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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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Books about Suffering
