Quotes about suffering

Yours is not to reason why, eh? I guess you’re lucky at that. It’s not dying that hurts—it’s living.

He saw himself reflected in other people's faces, and the horror and the pity he saw there had never ceased to wound him.

Another discovery was that the size and importance of an action is no yardstick of its personal unpleasantness. A big operation which commands headlines may be a dawdle for some of those involved, while the little forgotten patrol is a real horror.

I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer—namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.”

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, those limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.

98 percent of the animals raised for food suffer horrifically on factory farms before being slaughtered. Every time you eat a vegan meal, you're voting for something different.

[...] I learned from those evening recitals that music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times.

What dost thou know of suffering and oppression? I and my people know, but not thou.

We have... increased food production, built cities, established empires and created... trade networks. But did we decrease... suffering..? ...[M]assive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.

There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real.

In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.