quotations about suffering
Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
AMERICAN PROVERB
Let a man live but two or three years without Affliction, and he is almost good for nothing.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Suffering must be the inevitable tariff exacted from spirit for residing in human form.
MARK FROST
The List of Seven
Suffering is as God's letter. Open it and read it. Many a one will find that he is titled, or that there is an inheritance laid up for him.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
In this house of suffering
I gotta let some joy in
BAD BRAINS
"House of Suffering"
When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
BERTOLT BRECHT
"When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain"
You know, my dear, you're wrong that suffering ennobles people.... It simply makes one cross.
GREGORY BENFORD
"Nooncoming", In Alien Flesh
Complete success alienates a man from his fellows, but suffering makes kinsmen of us all.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Some people seem to be born to suffer.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
Easter
It is a comfort, in anguish, to be reminded of the scale of one's own troubles against the mighty breadth of the world.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
Learn to bear suffering, and it shall bear thee.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Still to the sufferer comes, as due from God, a glory that to suffering owes its birth.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Sometimes the only way around suffering is to go straight through it.
ANONYMOUS
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
The suffering's here
The wait is gone
The streets are filled
With a hollow song
Got a new death
It lurks outside
Follows me home
DANZIG
"End of Time"
Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American
Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.
LATIN PROVERB
War, pain and suffering is a form of cleansing that will shock people awake.
ISMAIL ROYER
"Fourteen years ago, he was a convicted jihadist. Now he's fighting radical Islam steps from the White House.", Washington Post, July 7, 2017