Suffering Quotes
No worthy goal should come easily, he told himself. Suffering created value.
Conn Iggulden
If somehow we could snap our fingers and there would no longer be any drugs in the world whatsoever, would there be no more addiction? Would there be no more suffering? Or is it possible that addiction is not really about drugs, that addiction is really about the relationships that human beings form with one another and all sorts of things? That it's about the difference between establishing good relationships and bad relationships? Who is going to be in control? Who is going to say what this relationship should be between ourselves and these plants and chemicals and substances?... Is this a decision that we just put in the hands of government? Is this a decision we put just in the hands of doctors? Just in the hands of the pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco companies, the alcohol companies and all the other corporations that profit off of the production and sale of these things? The true challenge is how do we learn to live with these substances in such a way that they cause the least possible harm and the greatest possible good. What will cause people to wake up and say "Stop?" What will cause people to say, "Enough is enough?" What will cause people to say, "I value my freedom even if that freedom involves a measure of risk?"
Ethan Nadelmann
Suffering is the price of being alive, and it is music and singing and art that has helped me live through some of the most difficult things that have happened to me.
Judy Collins
He's incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while.
Albert Camus
If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself, if you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
Lao Tzu
For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
Paul Farmer
On the one hand maybe I’ve remained infantile, while on the other I matured quickly, because at a young age I was very aware of suffering and fear.
Audrey Hepburn
I often hear people say that a person suffering from Alzheimer's is not the person they knew. I wonder to myself - Who are they then?
Bob DeMarco
It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I loathe, detest, hate and abominate the block, the gibbet, the rack, the pillory and the faggots with equal passion," said the old man vehemently. "Not only are they devilishly cruel but they are not even common sense. They do not lesson the evil in the world, they increase it, by making those who handle these cruelties as wicked as those who suffer them. No, I'm wrong, more wicked, for there is always some expiation made in the endurance of suffering and none at all in the infliction of it.
Elizabeth Goudge
Who alone suffers suffers most i' th' mind,
Leaving free things and happy shows behind;
But then the mind much sufferance doth o'erskip
When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.
William Shakespeare
They only the victory win,
Who have fought the good fight and have vanquished the demon that tempts us within;
Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that the world holds on high;
Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight -- if need be, to die.
William Wetmore Story
The facts of our lives, when we are able to know them, will free us from the torment we are in. When we can bear reality thoroughly, suffering is over. Pain may exist, but it is only pain. Suffering is what we add to pain.
Brenda Shoshanna
Pain is evitable. Suffering is optional.
Kathleen Casey
For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.
Yann Martel
Without our suffering, our work would simply be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption.
Mother Teresa
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
Arthur Schopenhauer
There's a reticence necessary when you consider the suffering of others. Into the space created by that reticence, you bring in those things that best help us confront ambiguity: music, painting, film, and so on.
Teju Cole