Pain Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

A Philosopher's school is a Surgery: pain, not pleasure, you should have felt therein. For on entering none of you is whole. One has a shoulder out of joint, another an abscess: a third suffers from an issue, a forth pains in the head. And am I then to sit dwon and treat you to pretty sentiments and empty fluourishes, so that you may applaud me and depart, with neither shoulder, nor head, nor issue, nor abscess a whit the better for your visit? Is it then for this that young men are to quit their homes, and leave parents, friends, kinsmen and substance to mouth out Bravo to your empty phrases!

My duty moves along with my song: I am I am not: that is my destiny. I exist not if I do not attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed, I come from the people and I sing for them: my poetry is song and punnishment.

What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She's perfectly well and she hasn't a pain,
And it's lovely rice pudding for dinner again!
What is the matter with Mary Jane?

For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.

Thomas Jefferson

The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. Man gets his through months and months of cruel torture; he will never get a set which can really be depended on 'till a dentist makes him one.

For Fate has wove the thread of life with pain,
And twins ev'n from the birth are Misery and Man!

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

And with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

Like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment.

Pain is an inconsiderable thing if not reinforced by opinion.

Seneca the Younger

The snail, whose tender horns being hit, Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain, And there, all smother'd in shade, doth sit, Long after fearing to creep forth again.

William Shakespeare

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

George Bernard Shaw

Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.

Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.

Arthur Schopenhauer

O, this life Is nobler than attending for a check, Richer than doing nothing for a robe, Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk: Such pain the cap of him that makes him fine Yet keeps his book uncrossed.

William Shakespeare

English which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.... The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.

Mothers are often fondest of the child which has caused them the greatest pain.

The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

The result of law inviolate is perfection–right–negative happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain.

Edgar Allan Poe

Often I wonder what does really God get from me in this state — no faith, no love — not even in feelings. The other day I can't tell you how bad I felt. — There was a moment when I nearly refused to accept. — Deliberately I took the Rosary and very slowly and without even meditating or thinking – I said it slowly and calmly. The moment passed — but the darkness is so dark, and the pain is so painful. – But I accept whatever He gives and I give whatever He takes. People say they are drawn closer to God — seeing my strong faith. – is this not deceiving people? Every time I have wanted to tell the truth – that I have no faith – the words just do not come – my mouth remains closed. – And yet I still keep on smiling at God and all.

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power....

Whether joy or sorrow, pain or pleasure; whatsoever may befall thee, accept it serenely with an unvanquished heart.

Rabindranath Tagore

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.