Quotes on Suffering

The melancholy joys of evils pass'd, For he who much has suffer'd, much will know.

Once an individual's search for meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering

Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village in this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that leave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.

Me miserable! Which way shall I fly_x000D_ Infinite wrath and infinite despair?_x000D_ Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;_x000D_ And in the lowest deep a lower deep,_x000D_ Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,_x000D_ To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.

The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.

Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.

Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

When men are unhappy, they do not imagine they can ever cease to be so; and when some calamity has fallen on them, they do not see how they can get rid of it. Nevertheless, both arrive; and the gods have ordered it so, in the end men seek it from the gods

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.

It is in everybody's interest to seek those [actions] that lead to happiness and avoid those which lead to suffering. And because our interests are inextricably linked, we are compelled to accept ethics as the indispensable interface between my desire to be happy and yours.

There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death.

It is ordained that to the ambitious, who derive no satisfaction from the gifts of life and the beauty of the world, life shall be a cause of suffering, and they shall possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world.

This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

Those who read books cannot understand the teachings and, what's more, may even go astray. But those who try to observe the things going on in the mind, and always take that which is true in their own minds as their standard, never get muddled. They are able to comprehend suffering, and ultimately will understand Dharma. Then, they will understand the books they read.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever.

We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.