Quotes about Suffering

"You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love."
-Chuck Palahniuk

"To perceive is to suffer."
-Aristotle

"Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones."
-Oscar Wilde

"Men weren't really the enemy -- they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill."
-Betty Friedan

"Man suffers most from the suffering he fears, but never appears, therefore he suffers more then god meant him to suffer."
-Dutch Proverb

"But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose."
-G. K. Chesterton

"You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering."
-Henri Frederic Amiel

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it."
-Helen Keller

"In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying."
-Bertrand Russell

"The most distressing aspect of the world into which you are going is its indifference to the basic issues, which now, as always, are moral issues."
-Robert Maynard Hutchins

"So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world."
-Isodore Duncan

"He who suffers much will know much."
-Greek Proverb

"The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt."
-Thomas Merton

"A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer."
-Joseph Addison

"Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you to stop suffering."
-Jane Roberts

"Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some."
-Jose Marti

"Suffering, once accepted, loses its edge, for the terror of it lessens, and what remains is generally far more manageable than we had imagined."
-Lesley Hazelton

"People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar."
-Thich Nhat Hanh

"If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights."
-Victor Hugo

"You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy."
-John Calvin

"But penance need not be paid in suffering...It can be paid in forward motion. Correcting the mistake is a positive move, a nurturing move."
-Barbara Hall

"Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough."
-Jean Paul Sartre

"The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?""
-Jeremy Bentham

"One of the greatest sources of suffering is to have an inborn sense of honor."
-De Casseres

""It's an art to live with pain... mix the light in into grey."--Love Boat Captain--."
-Eddie Vedder

"We have been through this is biennial convulsion four or five different times over the past 10 or 12 years, and now it appears that we are going through this quiet agony all over again."
-Senator Everett Dirksen

"The reward of suffering is experience."
-Aeschylus