Suffering Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Michel de Montaigne

Because violence can only breed more violence and suffering, our struggle must remain nonviolent and free of hatred. We are trying to end the suffering of our people, not to inflict suffering on others.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Inner darkness, which we call ignorance, is the root of suffering. The more inner light that comes, the more darkness will diminish. This is the only way to achieve salvation or nirvana.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

I have not lost the hope that the masses will refuse to bow to the Moloch of war but they will rely upon their own capacity for suffering to save their country's honour.

What actually fills you with indignation as regards suffering is not suffering in itself but the pointlessness of suffering.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead.

Michael Jackson

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone that has produced all the elevations of humanity so far?

Friedrich Nietzsche

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.

Suffering will come, trouble will come - that's part of life; a sign that you are alive. If you have no suffering and no trouble, the devil is taking it easy. You are in his hand.

And Christ, through His own salvific suffering, is very much present in every human suffering, and can act from within that suffering by the powers of His Spirit of truth, His consoling spirit.

Pope John Paul II

The love of a dog for his master is notorious; in the agony of death he has been known to caress his master, and everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.

I think the person who has had more experience of hardships can stand more firmly in the face of problems than the person who has never experienced suffering. From this angle then, some suffering can be a good lesson for life.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Jesus taught us how to forgive out of love, how to forget out of humility. So let us examine our hearts and see if there is any unforgiven hurt -- any unforgotten bitterness! It is easy to love those who are far away. It isn't always easy to love those who are right next to us. It is easier to offer food to the hungry than to answer the lonely suffering of someone who lacks love right in one

The rationale for loving others is the recognition of the simple fact that every living being has the same right to and the same desire for happiness, and not suffering, and the consideration that you as one individual are one life unit as compared with the mulititude of others in their ceaseless quest for happiness.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

If one wants to be an ox one can easily turn one's back on hum suffering and look after one's own skin.

To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

The Cross of Christ bears the suffering and the sin of mankind, including our own. Jesus accepts all this with open arms, bearing on His shoulders our crosses and saying to us: 'Have courage! You do not carry your cross alone! I carry it with you. I have overcome death and I have come to give you hope, to give you life' (John 3:16).

I call God long-suffering and patient precisely because He permits evil in the world. I know that He has no evil in Him and yet if there is evil, He is the author of it and yet untouched by it.

Has a man the right to kill himself? Yes, if his death harms no one and if life is an evil to him. When is life an evil? When it offers a man nothing but suffering and pain.

Napoleon I of France

Thus to share in the sufferings of Christ is, at the same time, to suffer for the kingdom of God. In the eyes of the just God, before his judgment. Those who share in the sufferings of Christ become worthy of this kingdom.

Pope John Paul II

On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don't want, I won't accept life on any other!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Ahimsa means infinite love, which again means infinite capacity for suffering.

To the extent that our experience of suffering reminds us of what everyone else also endures, it serves as a powerful inspiration to practice compassion and avoid causing others pain. And to the extent that suffering awakens our empathy and causes us to connect with others, it serves as the basis of compassion and love.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.

Bertrand Russell