Suffering Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I choose to identify with the underprivileged, I choose to give my life for the hungry, I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity... this is the way I'm going. If it means suffering, I'm going that way. If it means dying for them, I'm going that way, because I heard a voice saying DO SOMETHING FOR OTHERS.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Time will pass, and we shall go away for ever, and we shall be forgotten, our faces will be forgotten, our voices, and how many there were of us; but our sufferings will pass into joy for those who will live after us, happiness and peace will be established upon earth, and they will remember kindly and bless those who have lived before.

How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were tobegin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought!

Henry David Thoreau

The symptoms or the sufferings generally considered to be inevitable and incident to the disease are very often not symptoms of the disease at all, but of something quite different-of the want of fresh air, or of light, or of warmth, or of quiet, or of cleanliness, or of punctuality and care in the administration of diet, of each or of all of these.

Florence Nightingale

Under the bright sun, many of us are gathered together with different languages, different styles of dress, even different faiths. However, all of us are the same in being humans, and we all uniquely have the thought of 'I' and we're all the same in wanting happiness and in wanting to avoid suffering.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Woman is the embodiment of sacrifice and suffering and her advent to public life should, therefore, result in purifying it, in restraining unbridled ambition and accumulation of property.

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

The civilization of a state should be measured by the amount of suffering it prevents and the degree of happiness it makes possible for its citizens.

We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.

Enter with me into the sufferings, not only of the people of India but of the whole world. Nonviolence is a more active and real fight against wickedness than retaliation whose very nature is to increase wickedness. It is not a weapon of the weak. It is a weapon of the strongest and bravest.

We are all basically the same human beings, who seek happiness and try to avoid suffering. Everybody is my peer group. Your feeling "I am of no value" is wrong. Absolutely wrong.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind... there is no evidence that they cause him unhappiness except when the sufferers happen to be his friends.

Bertrand Russell

We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place.

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

Michel de Montaigne

The equity of Providence has balanced peculiar sufferings with peculiar enjoyments.

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.

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.

Compassion can be roughly defined in terms of a state of mind that is nonviolent, nonharming, and nonaggressive. It is a mental attitude based on the wish for others to be free of their suffering and is associated with a sense of commitment, responsibility, and respect towards others.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.

Charles Dickens

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

The whole of what we know is a system of compensation. Every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded; every sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering... since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

God never closes off horizons; He is never unconcerned about the lives and sufferings of His children. God never allows Himself to be outdone in generosity.