Last Updated: December 18, 2022 by Quote.cc Team
360 suffering quotes that’ll help you prevail over torment.
People sometimes experience suffering. Deaths, calamities, challenges, and other ugly situations cause people to suffer. Some are unavoidable, so the best course of action is not to falter, move on, and learn from it.
Beautiful people don’t just happen. Read these suffering quotes if you’re unsure how to make it through this. They’ll inspire you to take what you’ve been given and give back differently. So you can grow through your pain and come out the other side now. And share these suffering quotes about life with your friends, family, and loved ones to inspire them as well.
360 Suffering Quotes
Top 10 Suffering Quotes
“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.” – Laura Hillenbrand
“Your suffering needs to be respected. Don’t try to ignore the hurt, because it is real. Just let the hurt soften you instead of hardening you. Let the hurt open you instead of closing you. Let the hurt send you looking for those who will accept you instead of hiding from those who reject you.” – Bryant McGill
“Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.” – William S. Burroughs
“This your island, which seemed as to this particular the happiest in the world, will suffer much by the cursed avarice of a few persons.” – Thomas More
“That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person.” – John Green
“Sadly, many of the things that undermine our joy and happiness, we create ourselves. Often it comes from the negative tendencies of the mind, emotional reactivity, or from our inability to appreciate and utilize the resources within us… We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy.” – Dalai Lama
“Perhaps the main task of the minister is to prevent people from suffering for the wrong reasons.” – Henri J. M. Nouwen
“Our friend Tom, in his own simple musings, often compared his more fortunate lot, in the bondage into which he was cast, with that of Joseph in Egypt; and, in fact, as time went on, and he developed more and more under the eye of his master, the strength of the parallel increased.” – Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Jurgis had first come to the stockyards he had been as clean as any workingman could well be. But later on, what with sickness and cold and hunger and discouragement, and the filthiness of his work, and the vermin in his home, he had given up washing in winter, and in summer only as much of him as would go into a basin. He had had a shower bath in jail, but nothing since—and now he would have a swim!” – Upton Sinclair
“It occurred to me that the Catholics had done this to her—whatever it was, it surely qualified for the unmentioned UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE that Owen claimed his father and mother had suffered. There was something about Mrs. Meany’s obdurate self-imprisonment that smacked of religious persecution—if not eternal damnation.” – John Irving
What Is Suffering?
“Suffering presents us with a challenge: to find our goals and purpose in our lives that make even the worst situation worth living through.” – Viktor E. Frankl
“Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.” – Ram Dass
“Suffering means being cut off from God. Therefore those who live in communion with him cannot really suffer.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.” – Franz Kafka
“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.” – Ram Dass
“Suffering is one of life’s great teachers.” – Bryant H. McGill
“Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you how to stop suffering. That is its purpose.” – Jane Roberts
“Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth.” – Anthony de Mello
“Suffering is due to our disconnection with the inner soul. Meditation is establishing that connection.” – Amit Ray
“Suffering in search of truth gives true meaning to the truth.” – Muata Ashby
“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.” – Charles Dickens
“Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.” – Eckhart Tolle
“Suffering for Jesus is temporary. Pleasure in Jesus is eternal.” – John Piper
“Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad. That causes an emotional contraction. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you. The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself.” – Eckhart Tolle
“Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.” – Aristotle
Pain And Suffering Quotes
“Even when I bore the pain of my search valiantly, in silence, the mute sufferings of my soul were loud voices calling to your mercy. You knew what I endured, but no man knew.” – St. Augustine
“Courage would be impossible in a world without pain.” – Lee Strobel
“Beauty, youth, good fortune, even love itself, cannot keep care and pain, loss and sorrow, from the most blessed for…into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and sad and dreary.” – Louisa May Alcott
“An experience of collective pain does not deliver us from grief or sadness; it is a ministry of presence. These moments remind us that we are not alone in our darkness and that our broken heart is connected to every heart that has known pain since the beginning of time.” – Brené Brown
“Augustus nodded at the screen. ‘Pain demands to be felt,’ he said, which was a line from An Imperial Affliction.” – John Green
“Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding.” – John Steinbeck
“How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul? How will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person’s suffering?” – Chaim Potok
“Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human … the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength.” – J. K. Rowling
“I don’t believe there is pleasure in life. I believe there is only relief of pain. We have to suffer to be on top.” – Georges St-Pierre
“I think it’s the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you’re a person that matters.” – Marilyn Manson
“If God gives you an abundant harvest of trials, it is a sign of great holiness which He desires you to attain. Do you want to become a great saint? Ask God to send you many sufferings. The flame of Divine Love never rises higher than when fed with the wood of the Cross, which the infinite charity of the Savior used to finish His sacrifice. All the pleasures of the world are nothing compared with the sweetness found in the gall and vinegar offered to Jesus Christ. That is, hard and painful things endured for Jesus Christ and with Jesus Christ.” – Ignatius of Loyola
“It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.” – Natsume Sōseki
“Let me take a moment to tell those of you who are dealing with and fighting through something painful: it is a miracle that you’re sitting here. You are nobly doing your best to battle your way through it. You are a warrior because of the trials you are going through, but don’t you dare squander the strength you have earned just because the acquisition of it was painful.” – Rachel Hollis
“My father taught me with silence. . .to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain … by turning inside oneself. . . . It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe.” – Chaim Potok
“Pain and suffering have come into your life, but remember pain, sorrow, suffering are but the kiss of Jesus – a sign that you have come so close to Him that He can kiss you.” – Mother Teresa , Suffering quotes & pain
“Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Beneath its breath souls develop.” – Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
“Pain is never permanent.” – Teresa of Avila
“Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain.” – Jim Morrison
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” – Haruki Murakami
“Pain is certain, suffering is optional.” – Lachlan Brown
“Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is… The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds.” – Dan Millman
“Strong people alone know how to organize their suffering so as to bear only the most necessary pain.” – Emil Dorian
“The last few hours were certainly very painful,” replied Anne: “but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering-” – Jane Austen
“The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.” – Thomas Merton
“The more we diminish our own pain, or rank it compared to what others have survived, the less empathetic we are to everyone.” – Brené Brown
“There was no pain in their eyes and no knowledge of the agony of their body. There was only joy in them, and pride, a pride holier than it is fit for human pride to be.” – Ayn Rand
“The trick to healing from suffering, I think, is deciding that the pain was worth it.” – Aella
“The universe is a soul making machine, and part of that process is learning, maturing, and growing through difficult and challenging and painful experiences. The point of our lives in this world isn’t comfort, but training and preparation for eternity.” – Lee Strobel
“Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.” – Pema Chödrön
“We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can evolve in a state of joy and inspiration.” – Joe Dispenza
“We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.” – Jim Rohn
“We often add to our pain and suffering by being overly sensitive, over-reacting to minor things, and sometimes taking things too personally.” – Dalai Lama
“Whatever pain and suffering you’ve experienced in your life has been a blessing at least in this one regard: you now know some true things that you couldn’t have learned any other way.” – Eric Maisel
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” – Mark Twain
“When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to her who suffers, and try to help her.” – Leo Tolstoy
“Without pain, how could we know joy?′ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.” – John Green
“Where there is suffering, there is happiness.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“I don’t know how to live good. I only know how to suffer.” – Bob Marley
“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“I did not pray for any relief, but I prayed for strength to suffer with courage, humility and love.” – Brother Lawrence
“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.” – Hermann Hesse
Love Suffering Quotes
“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.” – Julian Barnes
“When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this – so accidental – just when everything was going well.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him.” – Laura Hillenbrand
“They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
“There’s no good way to lose a loved one—just, in the words of one twenty-six-year-old woman, ‘different kinds of hell.’” – Hope Edelman
“The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them.” – C. S. Lewis
“The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night—because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.‘” – Jodi Picoult
“That long-ago day, sitting in this very spot on the dock, she had already begun to feel it: how hard it would be to inherit their parents’ dreams. How suffocating to be so loved. She had felt Nath’s hands on her shoulders and been almost grateful to fall forward, to let herself sink… Don’t let me sink, she had thought as she reached for his hand, and he had promised not to when he took it. This moment, Lydia thought. This is where it all went wrong.” – Celeste Ng
“Suffer love,–a good epithet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.” – William Shakespeare
“Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.” – Dodie Smith
“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering…” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.” – Brother Lawrence
“Jesus’ suffering and death brought joy and life. His humiliation brought glory; his rejection brought a community of love.” – Henri J. M. Nouwen
“It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.” – Sigmund Freud
“If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer.” – David Deida
“Is there suffering upon this new earth? 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.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
“If the first mark of a true and living church is love, the second is suffering. The one is naturally consequent on the other. A willingness to suffer proves the genuineness of love.” – John Stott
“Feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation.” – David Deida
“Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning – because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ‘cause the world done whipped him so! When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.” – Lorraine Hansberry
“As I fixed my eyes on the child, I saw something glittering on his breast. I took it; it was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it softened and attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; but presently my rage returned; I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow and that she whose resemblance I contemplated would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
“As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is “AUTHENTICITY”.” – Charlie Chaplin
“And yet she hadn’t the air of a woman whose life had been touched by uncertainty or suffering. Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.” – Nella Larsen
“Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.” – Lachlan Brown
“Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the Now. You can’t argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.” – Eckhart Tolle
“A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.” – Albert Camus
“A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.” – Byron Katie
“I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” – Elie Wiesel
“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. , Human suffering quotes
“I am taught by suffering to endure.” – Sophocles
“All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.” – Edgar Allan Poe
“A suffering person does not need a lecture – he needs a listener.” – Billy Graham
Life Suffering Quotes
“And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.” – Charles Dickens
“And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost. ” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“All my life’s been full of hard trouble. If I wasn’t hungry, I was sick. And if I wasn’t sick, I was in trouble. I ain’t never bothered nobody. I just worked hard every day as long as I can remember. … And now I’m in this. They looking for me and when they catch me they’ll kill me. ” – Richard Wright
“All suffering has an end, David, if only you wait long enough. Sorrow has its life like people. Sorrow is born and lives and dies. And when it’s dead and gone, someone’s left behind to remember it. Exactly like people.” – Anne Holm
“But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.” – Paulo Coelho
“Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.” – Laura Hillenbrand
“I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again.” – Bernard Malamud
“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.” – Viktor Emil Frankl
“Like the ocean that remains calm in its depths even when waves rage over its surface, and like the sun that continues shining on high even during storms, we can at each moment create value and develop our state of life, enjoying our existence to the fullest in times of both suffering and joy.” – Daisaku Ikeda
“Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term, so you can get paid in the long term.” – Naval Ravikant
“Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draws it.” – Lachlan Brown
“The years that are gone seem like dreams—if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.” – Kate Chopin
“To become a spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.” – Oscar Wilde
“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.” – André Aciman
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” – Bertrand Russell
“We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.” – Pema Chödrön
“We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.” – Bernard Malamud
“We should put life in our faith. We should give ourselves utterly to God in pure abandonment, in temporal and spiritual matters alike, and find contentment in the doing of His will, whether he takes us through sufferings or consolations.” – Brother Lawrence
“When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.” – Philip Yancey
“For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering.” – Albert Camus
“For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing.” – St. Augustine
“Foolish woman. Don’t you realize this is just the beginning? We have the chance now to die with dignity.” – Ruta Sepetys
“Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.” – Seneca
“Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering and the lonely right there where you are.” – Mother Teresa
“Fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.” – Paulo Coelho
“Everyone was so kind. Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.” – John Green
“Everyone suffers, even the good Lord suffered when he was on Earth.” – Wilson Rawls
“God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.” – Saint Augustine
“God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.” – William Nicholson
“For with eyes made clear by many tears, and a heart softened by the tenderest sorrow, she recognized the beauty of her sister’s life–uneventful, unambitious, yet full of the genuine virtues which ‘smell sweet, and blossom in the dust’, the self-forgetfulness that makes the humblest on earth remembered soonest in heaven, the true success which is possible to all. ” – Louisa May Alcott
“A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.” – Janet Fitch
“A blight is on our harvest in the ear, A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds, A blight on wives in travail; and withal Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague Hath swooped upon our city emptying The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm Of Pluto is full fed with groans and tears.” – Sophocles
“‘How could any Lord have made this world?’ she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.” – Virginia Woolf
“‘Dear little swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and women. There is no mystery so great as Misery. Fly over my city, little swallow, and tell me what you see.’” – Oscar Wilde
“Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.” – Sam Harris
“All throughout Scripture and history, the principal suffering of the poor is not that they can’t pay their rent on time or that they are three dollars short of a package of Pampers . . . The principal suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace.” – Greg Boyle
“Her sorrow was extreme. She threw herself on the ground, screamed, appealed to God, and wept all alone in the fields until the sunrise. Then she returned to the farm and announced that she wanted to leave.” – Gustave Flaubert
“Hell is not for eternity.” – Elie Wiesel
“God is so committed to your ultimate joy that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself for you.” – Timothy Keller
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” – Michel de Montaigne
“God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with.” – Henry Ward Beecher
“All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.” – Helen Keller
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller
Suffering Quotes Buddhism
“We always find that those who walked closest to Christ were those who had to bear the greatest trials.” – Teresa of Avila
“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?” – Samuel Beckett
“Walking back past the roadside cross, Félicité decided to commend to God what she cherished the most. She stood there for a long time, looking up at the sky and praying, her face bathed in tears.” – Gustave Flaubert
“Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.” – Elder Thaddeus
“They say of some temporary suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.” – C. S. Lewis
“They called it battle fatigue, and they said hallucinations were common with malarial fever.” – Leslie Marmon Silko
“They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.” – Elie Wiesel
“There’s no hope for him now, Travis. He’s suffering. You know we’ve got to do it.” – Fred Gipson
“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world?” – Yuval Noah Harari
“We feel friendly towards those whom we help to secure good for themselves, provided we are not likely to suffer heavily by it ourselves.” – Aristotle
“We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.” – Willie Nelson
“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.” – Anna Sewell
“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” – Marcel Proust
“When we see these things (suffering), we realize that not only do we suffer, but so do many of our human brothers and sisters. So when we look at the same event from a wider perspective, we will reduce the worrying and our own suffering.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.” – M. Scott Peck
“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.” – Albert Camus
“The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.” – Lachlan Brown
“The root of suffering is attachment.” – Lachlan Brown
“The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.” – Cheryl Strayed
“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” – John Green
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.” – C. S. Lewis
“We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us – a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don’t close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.” – Pema Chodron
“We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.” – Winston Churchill
“It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.” – Zora Neale Hurston
“It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.” – Suzanne Collins
“It takes great courage to open one’s heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world.” – Vincent A. Gallagher
“It seems that most people need to experience a great deal of suffering before they will relinquish resistance and accept – before they will forgive.” – Eckhart Tolle
“It requires more courage to suffer than to die.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
“Jurgis could not hear it often enough; he could not ask with enough variations. Yes, they had bought the house, they had really bought it. It belonged to them, they had only to pay the money and it would be all right. Then Jurgis covered his face with his hands, for there were tears in his eyes, and he felt like a fool. But he had had such a horrible fright; strong man as he was, it left him almost too weak to stand up.” – Upton Sinclair
“John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” – Charlotte Gilman
“Job never saw why he suffered, but he saw God, and that was enough.” – Timothy Keller
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” – Charles Dickens
“Lord, I am willing To receive what You give. To lack what You withhold. To relinquish what You take, To suffer what You inflict, To be what you require.” – Jerry Bridges
“Look! Her wedding ring slipped – she had grown so thin. It was she who suffered – but she had nobody to tell.” – Virginia Woolf
“Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.” – Mark Z. Danielewski
“Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.” – C. S. Lewis
“Keep in mind that many people have died for their beliefs; it’s actually quite common. The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe.” – Christopher Paolini
“Justice is not Healing. Healing cometh only by suffering and patience, and maketh no demand, not even for Justice.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
“Our past may explain why we’re suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.” – Joyce Meyer
“Mindfulness puts an end to such a limited perspective. The Buddha faced his own suffering directly and discovered the path of liberation. Don’t run away from things that are unpleasant in order to embrace things that are pleasant. Put your hands in the earth. Face the difficulties and grow new happiness.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Mindfulness is the best way to be with our suffering without being overwhelmed by it. Mindfulness is the capacity to dwell in the present moment, to know what’s happening in the here and now.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. ” – Henri J. M. Nouwen
“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.” – Leo Tolstoy
“Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in . . . terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.” – Viktor Emil Frankl
“Only a third of PTSD sufferers receive treatment because it is tough to diagnose and a challenge to treat, a situation further complicated by the fact that sufferers are often hard to reach.” – Shaili Jain
“Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.” – Nhat Hanh
“Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.” – Ram Dass
“Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.” – Ram Dass
“Everyone faces the challenge of finding meaning to their suffering.” – Phil McGraw
“Either this girl loses her sister, I think, or she’s going to lose herself.” – Jodi Picoult
“Each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.” – Pope John Paul II
“Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.” – Don Miguel Ruiz
“And the more I drink the more I feel it. That’s why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink…. I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
“And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.” – C. S. Lewis
“But I hope you will heed this: A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.” – Khaled Hosseini
“Aren’t all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?” – C.S. Lewis
“Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.” – Eckhart Tolle
“As you would expect from children who have suffered loss and abuse, there is bullying, fighting and physical violence.” – Mirjam Pressler
“Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.” – Virginia Woolf
“He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more.” – Leslie Marmon Silko
“Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike; each has their suffering. Some suffer too much, others too little.” – Lachlan Brown
“Happiness. The enemy of all suffering.” – Rebecca Serle
“Happiness is not a reward – it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment – it is a result.” – Robert Green Ingersoll
“Handling our suffering is an art. If we know how to suffer, we suffer much less, and we’re no longer afraid of being overwhelmed by the suffering inside.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas, but for scars.” – Elbert Hubbard
“If I could talk to my younger self, I would just say that the path to great things is filled with a lot of stumbles, suffering, and challenges along the way. But if you have the right attitude and know that hard times will pass, and you get up each time – you will reach your destination.” – Jonny Kim
“If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“I…have a woman in my arms who has suffered greatly and desperately needs to believe once again that she is beautiful.” – Matthew Quick
“I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.” – Plato
“It is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.” – Paramahansa Yogananda
“No matter how much you hate or how much you suffer, you can’t bring the dead back to life.” – Watsuki Nobuhiro
“No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.” – Bram Stoker
“No human being can know the future. The greatest of disasters may overtake a man in the best of places, and the greatest happiness may seek him out in the worst. ” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed.” – Edgar Allan Poe
“In short: ‘Who can take away suffering without entering it?’” – Henri J. M. Nouwen
“If a man speak or act with a good thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.” – Lachlan Brown
“It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.” – H.G. Wells
“I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Suffering In Silence Quotes
“I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.” – C.S. Lewis
“Before now, and for quite some time, we maintained our decorum and suffered in silence whatever you men did, because you wouldn’t let us make a sound.” – Aristophanes
“Great souls suffer in silence.” – Friedrich Schiller
“It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same. He strolled about and talked with them, and the biggest of them told tales of their prowess, while those who were weaker, or younger and inexperienced, gathered round and listened in admiring silence. The last time he was there, Jurgis had thought of little but his family; but now he was free to listen to these men, and to realize that he was one of them—that their point of view was his point of view, and that the way they kept themselves alive in the world was the way he meant to do it in the future.” – Upton Sinclair
“When you first hear that suffering is a Noble Truth, you might wonder what’s so noble about suffering? The Buddha was saying that if we can recognize suffering, and if we embrace it and look deeply into its roots, then we’ll be able to let go of the habits that feed it and at the same time, find a way to happiness. Suffering has its beneficial aspects. It can be a an excellent teacher.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“When we see these things (suffering), we realize that not only do we suffer, but so do many of our human brothers and sisters. So when we look at the same event from a wider perspective, we will reduce the worrying and our own suffering.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.” – M. Scott Peck
“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.” – Albert Camus
“The reward of suffering is experience.” – Harry S Truman
“The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.” – C.S. Lewis
“The plague killed so many, Comfort, labor was scarce, good fields were left untilled. Poor folk like us began to know our worth and ask for better wages. That angered King Edward, our king’s grandfather. When the strong grow angry, Comfort, the weak will suffer.” – Henrietta Branford
“The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he cannot learn, feel change, grow or live…” – William Arthur Ward
“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.” – Franz Kafka
“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.” – Ernest Hemingway
“yet all this while I liv’d uncomfortably, by reason of the constant Apprehensions I was in of their coming up on me by Surprize; from whence I observe, that the Expectation of Evil is more bitter than the Suffering, especially if there is no room to shake off that Expectation, or Apprehensions.” – Daniel Defoe
“Wretch, may he pine in utter wretchedness!” – Sophocles
“Without the frown of clouds and lightning, the vines would be burned by the smiling sun.” – Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
“We need to be aware of the suffering, but retain our clarity, calmness and strength so we can help transform the situation.” – Nhat Hanh
“We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.” – Sharon Salzberg
“We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.” – Elie Wiesel
“There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope.” – Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
“There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and so become free.” – Ajahn Chah
“There are some wounds that one can heal only by deepening them and making them worse.” – Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam
“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!” – André Aciman
“We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.” – Bell Hooks
“We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we’re feeding our suffering while we’re walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We’re not living our lives.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“There was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.” – Viktor Emil Frankl
“There is recompense for suffering. A principle beyond selfishness is at work in the cosmos. All will be well. I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.” – David Berlinski
“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” – Viktor Emil Frankl
“There is nothing so disobedient as an undisciplined mind, and there is nothing so obedient as a disciplined mind.” – Lachlan Brown
“The injuries we do and those we suffer are seldom weighed in the same scales.” – Aesop
“The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest. All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.” – Eugene Peterson
“There’s a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don’t lose courage.” – Elie Wiesel
“There were, I considered, amongst my guests, varying degrees of guilt. Those whose guilt was the lightest should, I considered, pass out first, and not suffer the prolonged mental strain and fear that the more cold-blooded offenders were to suffer.” – Agatha Christie
“The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.” – Neal Shusterman
“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.” – Deepak Chopra
“The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered until you experience it properly and fully the first time.” – Ben Okri
“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” – C.S. Lewis
“To perceive is to suffer.” – Aristotle
“Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
“To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.” – Jordan B. Peterson
“I must add, too, that the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. ” – C. S. Lewis
“I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.” – Viktor Emil Frankl
“I have wanted . . . to commit a murder myself. I recognized this as the desire of the artist to express himself! . . . But—incongruous as it may seem to some—I was restrained and hampered by my innate sense of justice. The innocent must not suffer.” – Agatha Christie
“I have no … authority to be speaking up like a seer … We’ve had enough seers in this family. ” – J. D. Salinger
“It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.” – Viktor E. Frankl
“Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our souls, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.” – Paulo Coelho
“In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.” – Elie Wiesel
“He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness pondered always on the same insoluble question: ‘What is this? Can it be that it is Death?’ And the inner voice answered: ‘Yes, it is Death.‘” – Leo Tolstoy
“He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can.” – Brother Lawrence
“Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.” – Tennessee Williams
“Don’t take anything personally. Nothings others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.” – Miguel Angel Ruiz
“Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.” – Tim Ferriss
“But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.” – Hans Christian Andersen
“Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.” – Terry Tempest Williams
“Ben crouched beside the dying animal, aware that he could do nothing to save it now -that in a sense that he had done too much already.” – Victor Kelleher
“Being alive and being a woman is all I got but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet” – Ntozake Shange
“Dear Child of God, I am sorry to say that suffering is not optional.” – Desmond Tutu
“Cycling is suffering.” – Fausto Coppi
“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.” – Bell Hooks
“God will either shield you from suffering or give you unfailing strength to bear it.” – Saint Francis de Sales
Suffering Alone Quotes
“Wisdom comes alone through suffering.” – Aeschylus
“You must suffer me to go my own dark way.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping.” – John G. Neihardt
“You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That’s what Papa used to say.” – August Wilson
“You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them…But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.” – Aldous Huxley
“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.” – Henri Frederic Amiel
“When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.” – Chinua Achebe
“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task.” – Viktor Emil Frankl
“What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember.” – Seneca the Younger
“What dost thou know of suffering and oppression? I and my people know, but not thou.” – Mark Twain
“What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? … I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.” – Chaim Potok
“The greatest miracle is to be alive. We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for! How many people kill themselves because of rage or despair? In that moment, they do not see the vast happiness that is available.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“The evil-doer mourns in this world, and he mourns in the next; he mourns in both. He mourns and suffers when he sees the evil of his own work.” – Anonymous
“The deep meaning of the cross of Christ is that there is no suffering on earth that is not borne by God.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did. ” – John Green
“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.” – Charles Dickens
“The attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness.” – M. Scott Peck
“Without suffering, there’s no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Without suffering, there’d be no compassion.” – Nicholas Sparks
“Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on cliches and stay there, until the spirit dies as well.” – Robert Greene
“To see a wretched criminal squirming in the dock, suffering the tortures of the damned… was to me an exquisite pleasure. Mind you, I took no pleasure in seeing an innocent man there.” – Agatha Christie
“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature’s ladder.” – Rick Yancey
“Though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves.” – St. Augustine
“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren’t there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer!” – Margaret Mahy
“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.” – Thomas Merton
“White Fang had ceased eating, lost heart, and allowed every dog of the team to thrash him.” – Jack London
“The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“They were eyes no longer, but had become those fathomless mirrors which in men who have known the depths of suffering may replace the conscious gaze, so that they no longer see reality but reflect the memory of past events.” – Victor Hugo
“When you look deeply into your anger, you will see that the person you call your enemy is also suffering. As soon as you see that, the capacity of accepting and having compassion for them is there.” – Nhat Hanh
“When you first hear that suffering is a Noble Truth, you might wonder what’s so noble about suffering? The Buddha was saying that if we can recognize suffering, and if we embrace it and look deeply into its roots, then we’ll be able to let go of the habits that feed it and at the same time, find a way to happiness. Suffering has its beneficial aspects. It can be a an excellent teacher.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.” – Paulo Coelho
“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” – Tom Waits
“There are far too many silent sufferers. Not because they don’t yearn to reach out, but because they’ve tried and found no one who cares.” – Richelle E. Goodrich
“Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.” – Patti Smith
“Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy.” – Alexandre Dumas
“Sometimes it takes great suffering to pierce the soul and open it up to greatness.” – Jocelyn Murray
“Sometimes I think God is trying to test me, both now and in the future. I’ll have to become a good person on my own, without anyone to serve as a model or advise me, but it’ll make me stronger in the end.” – Anne Frank
“So that your punishment will indeed be infinite. Oh, who can express what the state of a soul in such circumstances is! ” – Jonathan Edwards
“Sarah couldn’t stand up straight any longer. She was too weak. The sun burned her faced. The babe cried and cried.” – Virginia Hamilton
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.” – Leo Tolstoy
“If there was a God, he’d guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I’d cut loose my pain, my longing.” – Khaled Hosseini
“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it.” – Cheryl Strayed
“No victory without suffering.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
“No there’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem—well, like, you. Like you did something, all right, and now you’re suffering for it.” – James Baldwin
“Of course Anna should be honored for donating her bone marrow. Of course she deserves recognition. But the thought of rewarding someone for their suffering, frankly, never entered my mind.” – Jodi Picoult
“Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the ‘erasing’ of people, the ‘hiding away’ of suffering.’” – Tracy Kidder
“Not to be able to stop thinking is an affliction, but we don’t realise this because almost everybody is suffering from it.” – Eckhart Tolle
“If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.” – Elbert Hubbard
“If you seek patience, you will find no better example than the cross. Great patience occurs in two ways: either when one patiently suffers much, or when one suffers things which one is able to avoid and yet does not avoid. Christ endured much on the cross, and did so patiently, because when he suffered he did not threaten; he was led like a sheep to the slaughter and he did not open his mouth.” – Thomas Aquinas
“If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever.” – Dan Millman
“Never stop just because you feel defeated. The journey to the other side is attainable only after great suffering.” – Santosh Kalwar
“Mother, when you’re disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus’ mother in the museum.” – Tennessee Williams
“Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds – and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.” – Sam Harris
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” – Helen Keller
“Cath could already feel the anxiety starting to tear her stomach into nervous little pieces. ‘It’s not just that…. I don’t like new places. New situations. There’ll be all those people, and I won’t know where to sit—I don’t want to go.’” – Rainbow Rowell
“Call’s gone to round up a dern bunch of cowboys so we can head out for Montana with a dern bunch of cows and suffer for the rest of our lives.” – Larry McMurtry
“But now George has TB and they tell me he may even die… Which adds to that darkness in my mind, all these DEATH things piling up suddenly — But I cant believe old Zen Master George is going to allow his body to die.” – Jack Kerouac
“In order to rise from its own ashes a phoenix first must burn.” – Octavia E. Butler
“If pain doesn’t lead to humility, you have wasted your suffering.” – Katerina Stoykova Klemer
“I saw clearly that so long as I was still a human being and not nothingness, I was alive and so could suffer, be angry and feel shame at my actions.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
“If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.” – Oscar Wilde
“Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind.” – Lachlan Brown
“Rather suffer an injustice than commit one.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.” – Edwidge Danticat
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.” – Elie Wiesel
“I only insist that meaning is available in spite of—nay, even through—suffering.” – Viktor Emil Frankl
“People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.” – Edward St. Aubyn
“I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.” – Charles Dickens
“I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents’ suffering.” – John Green
“People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don’t suffer anymore.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gates of Heaven.” – Bill Vaughan
“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.” – Nhat Hanh
“I suffer because my interactions with others do not meet the expectations I did not know I had.” – Jim McDonald
In Conclusion
Which of these quotes is your favorite?
Remember, if you want to suffer less, expect less. The only thing you control is the process, not the results.
Thank you for coming to this blog to read the quotes about suffering in love, life, and silence. If you enjoyed the quotes, please share them with a friend today!