Quotes about suffering

Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hush your laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous crying of the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of men sodden in misery turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an army of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped your ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds?

Conflict, pain, tension, fear, paradox... these are transformations trying to happen. Once we confront them, the transformative process begins.

The only way out of our suffering is through it. From an ancient Sanskrit writing: Do not try to drive pain away by pretending that it is not real. If you seek serenity in oneness, pain will vanish of its own accord.

I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

Strength comes not from avoiding suffering, but from enduring it with grace and resilience.

We all have the power to embrace our scars and rise like phoenixes from the ashes of our pain.

To know someone's pain is to share in it. And to share in it is to relieve some of it.

“The problem with you,” Force said, “is that you’re so used to pain and discomfort that your definition of feeling okay is not the greatest indicator of being okay.”

When buddhas look at samsara with the eyes of their omniscience, they do not see it as an enjoyable place. They are acutely aware of the sufferings of beings... and they see how senseless are the pointless, temporary goals that beings try so hard to attain.

[W]e 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.