Suffering Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The cause of suffering is not thinking, it's identification with thinking. This is very, very important to understand, because if you don't understand that it's identification with thinking that's really at the heart of the matter, and you assume that it's thinking itself that's the problem, then you can waste immense amounts of time and energy trying to stop your mind from thinking, trying to better your mind.

He [the informer] was a poor weak human being like themselves, a human soul, weak and helpless in suffering, shivering in the toils of the eternal struggle of the human soul with pain.

Liam O'Flaherty

It seems to me that everyone on this planet whom I know or have worked with is suffering from self-hatred and guilt to one degree or another. The more self-hatred and guilt we have, the less our lives work. The less self-hatred and guilt we have, the better our lives work, on all levels.

Vital is the relation between earthly sorrow and eternal satisfaction. The travail to which God's saints are subjected results in the birth of nobler natures and more sanctified spirits. Pain always promotes progress, and suffering invariably ensures success.

John McClellan Holmes

A decrease in the world supply of wheat has resulted in a very large increase in the price of that commodity. The position of all agricultural products indicates a better balanced supply, but we can not yet conclude that agriculture is recovered from the effects of the war period or that it is permanently on a prosperous basis. The cattle industry has not yet recovered and in some sections has been suffering from dry weather. Every effort must be made both by Government activity and by private agencies to restore and maintain agriculture to a complete normal relationship with other industries.

Calvin Coolidge

Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.

Nathaniel Branden

Every Israelite has a duty to study whether he is poor or rich, whether healthy or suffering, whether young or very old and in failing strength, even if he is poor and supported by charity or begs from door to door.

I heard the Master preach.
Don't be chained to love and suffering. Instead, cut the ties of love and you will rejoice in your heart. So he said in a loud voice. The Master is quite a fool.
He does not know: true it hurts to be tied with love, but it will hurt more to cut the ties of love, it will hurt more than even death.
In the tight binding of love's bonds lies their unbinding. Thus great liberation is to be had in the bonds themselves.
My love, I was afraid the rope of your love might be weak so I doubled the strands of my love for you.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Charles Baudelaire

The grace of God is abundant. It is for all lands, for all ages, for all conditions. It seems to undergird everything. Pardon for the worst sin, comfort for the sharpest suffering, brightest light for the thickest darkness.

Thomas De Witt Talmage

Lydia was the kind of friend whom people referred to as a 'party favor' — always fun to be around but she doesn't have any patience for suffering unless it's her own.

Chelsea Handler

As to the aridity you are suffering from, it seems to me our Lord is treating you like someone He considers strong: He wants to test you and see if you love Him as much at times of aridity as when He sends you consolations. I think this is a very great favor for God to show you.

Teresa of Ávila

People are strong despite suffering, not because of it.

Since suffering a concussion eight years ago, I find my inside emotions are right to the front and as such, when I heard that Antonio Carlos Jobim had died in December of 1994 I was much affected, I experienced happenings like no other time in my life. While sleeping one night, I dreamed that I was conducting a recording session with strings in Brazil and we were performing Jobim's "Corcovado," except that besides the melody and harmony, there was polyharmonic bass line. As I awakened from this dream, I went to my piano and wrote down what I had dreamed.

Legalism is nothing but a leader's way of avoiding suffering.

I receive letters from people who've been cured with the 'urine-therapy'…. Several years ago, a man called Lawrence Armstrong was suffering from TB. One day, he was reading the psalms from the Bible, he found the passage, 'Drink from your own cistern when you're in trouble.' He wondered what it meant. It struck him that it was his own urine. And, he saw in the veterinary hospitals some animals given their own urine by his doctor friend. Nature has provided its own cures. What happens to the birds and animals in the forest? For 45 days, he consumed all the urine he passed and at the end of it, he was a young man. Then he wrote a book, "Waters of Life".

Strength is born
in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts;
not amidst joy.

All suffering is caused by the illusion of separateness, which generates fear and self-hatred, which eventually causes illness. You are the master of your life. You can do much more than you thought you could, including cure yourself of a "terminal illness".

Barbara Brennan

All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others

Sharon Salzberg

There are no bonds so strong as those which are formed by suffering together

The task is to use our suffering and to use it so well that we can use it up.

I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.

Wherever there is suffering, injustice and oppression, the Americans will show up, six months late, and bomb the country next to where it's happening.

But should we continue to linger amid a scene so featureless and wild, or venture adown some yawning opening into the abyss beneath, where all is fiery and yet dark,-a solitary hell, without suffering or sin,-we would do well to commit ourselves to the guidance of a living poet of the true faculty,-Thomas Aird and see with his eyes.

It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.