Quotes about suffering

That's the funny thing about old hurts- they just wait for new heartache to come along and then show up, just as sharp and horrible as the first day you woke up with the world changed all around you.

The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.

You might get to thinking that the challenges you're facing are not as legitimate as other people's. But it's this very feeling of isolated helplessness that actually binds you to the majority of humans living on this planet.

True solidarity building requires that we acknowledge people's struggles as legitimate-even while upholding that some people's struggles intersect in far more ways, and some who suffer hold the power to make others' suffering worse.

She told of gifts that she'd been given, and how gifts once given cannot be taken away and do not change. Gifts did not change even though there could be a shifting in the self caused by pain. (The Stories, chapter 28 p174)

The movement's other great achievement is this. Among its supporters, it kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth.

Got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full.

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway.

So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.

Beekeepers have a saying that honey begins with a drop of sugar, and misery starts with a mote of dust. (p 312)

Naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see.

There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage; for those, we need each other.