Wisdom comes alone through suffering.
Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
I've suffered from all of the hang-ups known, and none is as bad as the telephone.
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.
Suffering is part of the divine idea.
It is good for me that I was afflicted that I may learn Thy statutes. [Psalms 119:71]
— Bible
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
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer
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.
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.
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
You do not have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing.
— Claudius
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.
We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
I like a look of Agony, because I know it's true -- men do not sham Convulsion, nor simulate, a Throe --
It is the lot of man to suffer.
Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
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.
Great artists suffer for the people.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.
The worst part a man can suffer is to have insight into much and power over nothing.
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.
If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.
Rather suffer than die is man's motto.
Oh, fear not in a world like this, and thou shalt know erelong, know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.
It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.
Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.
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.
One must really have suffered oneself to help others.
What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.
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.
To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.
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.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.
A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.
I have suffered too much in this world not to hope for another.
Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.
— Seneca
A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.
— Seneca
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.
We all choke.
Suffering is the ancient law of love; there is not quest without pain; there is no lover who is not also a martyr.
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.
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...
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.
You can't drown your sorrows, they always float to the surface.
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.
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.
Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.