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Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.
-Hindu Spiritual
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Wisdom comes alone through suffering.
-Aeschylus
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He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
-Aeschylus
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Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
-Aristotle
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I've suffered from all of the hang-ups known, and none is as bad as the telephone.
-Richard Armour
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You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief? We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.
-Antonin Artaud
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Suffering is part of the divine idea.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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It is good for me that I was afflicted that I may learn Thy statutes. Psalms 119:71
-Bible
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Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away blessed be the name of the Lord.
-Bible
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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 Papers From Prison
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Affliction, like the iron-smith, shapes as it smites.
-Christian Nevell Bovee
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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
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As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.
-Sir Richard Francis Burton
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In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.
-Albert Camus
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For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
-Thomas Carlyle
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The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
-Alexis Carrel
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Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gates of Heaven.
-Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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You do not have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
-John Ciardi
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No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing.
-Claudius
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Is suffering so very serious? I have come to doubt it. It may be quite childish, a sort of undignified pastime -- I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful. I agree that it's hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain deserves no consideration at all. It's no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.
-Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
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We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Suffering is nothing. It's all a matter of preventing those you love from suffering.
-Alphonse Daudet
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If I did not believe, if I did not make what is called an act of faith (and each act of faith increases our faith, and our capacity for faith), if I did not have faith that the works of mercy do lighten the sum total of suffering in the world, so that those who are suffering on both sides of this ghastly struggle somehow mysteriously find their pain lifted and some balm of consolation poured on their wounds, if I did not believe these things, the problem of evil would indeed be overwhelming.
-Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage
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I like a look of Agony, because I know it's true -- men do not sham Convulsion, nor simulate, a Throe --
-Emily Dickinson
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It is the lot of man to suffer.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
-John Donne
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The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
-William Faulkner
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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 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
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To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
-Roberta Flack
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To bear other people's afflictions, everyone has courage and enough to spare.
-Benjamin Franklin
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We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.
-Sigmund Freud
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Great artists suffer for the people.
-Marvin Gaye
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Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
-Kahlil Gibran
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A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.
-George Gurdjieff
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Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy.
-Felicia D. Hemans
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The worst part a man can suffer is to have insight into much and power over nothing.
-Herodotus
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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
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You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
-Hermann Hesse
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If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.
-Elbert Hubbard
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Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
-Helen Keller
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My personal trials have also taught me the value of unmerited suffering. As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation, which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., "Christian Century Magazine", April 27, 1960
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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 Philosophies, 1985
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Rather suffer than die is man's motto.
-Jean De La Fontaine
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Know how sublime a thing is to suffer and be strong.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Our sufferings will give us strength to help create a brave new world without needless sufferings.
-Peter Lopez
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It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.
-Robert Lynd
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The dominant characteristic of an authentic spiritual life is the gratitude that flows from trust
-Brennan Manning, The Dick Staub Interview
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Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.
-Katherine Mansfield
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It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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I knew that suffering did not enoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
-W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
-H. L. Mencken
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Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Without out suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed. And we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.
-Mother Theresa
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One must really have suffered oneself to help others.
-Mother Theresa
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What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
-George Orwell
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The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.
-Ovid, Tristia, Bk. IV
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Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time -- is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
-Cesare Pavese
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No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction
-Demetrius Phalerens
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I shall know by the gleam and glitter
Of the golden chain you wear,
By your heart's calm strength in loving,
Of the fire you have had to bear.
Beat on, true heart, forever;
Shine bright, strong golden chain;
And bless the cleansing fire
And the furnace of living pain!
-Adelaide Proctor
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We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.
-Marcel Proust
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A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.
-Jules Renard
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I have suffered too much in this world not to hope for another.
-Jean Jacques Rousseau
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Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.
-Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
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A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.
-Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
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It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
-Susan Sontag
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No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.
-C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon
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We all choke.
-Curtis Strange
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Suffering is the ancient law of love; there is not quest without pain; there is no lover who is not also a martyr.
-Heinrich Suso
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Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure.
-John Tillotson
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There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. . . . Man is the more man -- that is, the more divine -- the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.
-Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life ch. 9, 1913
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If you learn from your suffering, and really come to understand the lesson you were taught, you might be able to help someone else who's now in the phase you may have just completed. Maybe that's what it's all about after all...
-Source Unknown
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You can't drown your sorrows, they always float to the surface.
-Source Unknown
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The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
-Simone Weil
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To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
-Oscar Wilde
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I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.
-Oscar Wilde
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Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Books about Suffering
