Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Suffering.
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.
Charles Dickens
These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering beside one another and through one another; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling all the while.
Victor Hugo
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
Susan Sontag
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
Hermann Hesse
Suffering is part of the divine idea.
Henry Ward Beecher
The anatta theory denies the existence of a self only when the word self is taken to refer to some thing in addition to the groups of factors making up a person. The conviction that there is a substantial self is the root-cause of suffering, for this results in the attitude that underlies and makes possible the attachment of the various processes to a self. It is ignorance that allows the attachment and thereby makes possible suffering.
John M. Koller, Oriental Philoso
Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day:- I shall not fear anyone on Earth. - I shall fear only God. - I shall not bear ill will toward anyone. - I shall not submit to injustice from anyone. - I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.
Mahatma Gandhi
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.
Paulo Coelho
To bear other people's afflictions, everyone has courage and enough to spare.
Benjamin Franklin
It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering.
Jane Austen
Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
Aristotle
There is a very real danger of our drifting into an attitude of contempt for humanity. We know quite well that we have no right to do so, and that it would lead us into the most sterile relation to our fellow-men. The following thoughts may keep us from such a temptation. It means that we at once fall into the worst blunders of our opponents. The man who despises another will never be able to make anything of him. Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. Why have we hitherto thought so intemperately about man and his frailty and temptability? We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. The only profitable relationship to others -- and especially to our weaker brethren -- is one of love, and that means the will to hold fellowship with them. God himself did not despise humanity, but became man for men's sake.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and
Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.
I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing.
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.
Francis H. Bradley
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
Our sufferings will give us strength to help create a brave new world without needless sufferings.
Peter Lopez
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
Thomas Carlyle
Suffering is nothing. It's all a matter of preventing those you love from suffering.
Alphonse Daudet
If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.
Elbert Hubbard
