Quotes about suffering

The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. p. 24

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

If pain is the weight of being, love is the purpose.

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

These men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.

“No one will ever love you more than you love your pain,” he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark. (p154)

'Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.' (p145)

“There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.”

The teaching which you have heard, however, is not my opinion, and its goal is not to explain the world to those who are thirsty for knowledge. Its goal is quite different; its goal is salvation from suffering. That is what Gotama teaches, nothing else.

Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering.

I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.

It came as a pleasant shock to me, how the man I'd known as a rather dry intellectual transformed himself so completely into a craftsman - a man who actually made things that the world could put to practical use. Which only goes to show that people are more complicated than they let on, and that even tragedy (sometimes only tragedy) can open the door to who we really are.