Suffering Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

If those who are sent to draw water begin by drinking themselves, the army is suffering from thirst.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death.

Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Enjoying the joys of others and suffering with them-these are the best guides for man.

Albert Einstein

Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Every religion emphasizes human improvement, love, respect for others, sharing other people's suffering. On these lines every religion had more or less the same viewpoint and the same goal.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Marie Farrar: month of birth, April
Died in the Meissen penitentiary
An unwed mother, judged by the law, she will
Show you how all that lives, lives frailly.
You who bear your sons in laundered linen sheets
And call your pregnancies a "blessed" state
Should never damn the outcast and the weak:
Her sin was heavy, but her suffering great.
Therefore, I beg, make not your anger manifest
For all that lives needs help from all the rest.

No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

In dealing with those who are undergoing great suffering, if you feel "burnout" setting in, if you feel demoralized and exhausted, it is best, for the sake of everyone, to withdraw and restore yourself. The point is to have a long-term perspective.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

All suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their own happiness or satisfaction

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

How can it be "mutually beneficial" to sell at world market prices the raw materials that cost the underdeveloped countries immeasurable sweat and suffering, and to buy at world market prices the machinery produced in today's big automated factories?

Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.

G. K. Chesterton

To begin to live in the present, we must first atone for our past and be finished with it, and we can only atone for it by suffering, by extraordinary, unceasing exertion.

Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory... Everything is forgotten, even great love.

Clergyman and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

What makes us heroic? Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, "What is hell?" I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At sixteen, the adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely knows that other beings also suffer.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Joy lies in the fight, in the attempt, in the suffering involved, not in the victory itself

In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.