Quotes about suffering

There is a saying that some foolish people believe: what does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen the evidence – indeed, often enough having been the cause of it – that what does not kill you can leave you maimed. Or crippled, or begging for death or in one of those ghastly twilights experienced – and one has to hope that that is entirely not the right word – by those in a locked-in or persistent vegetative state. In my experience the same people also believe that everything happens for a reason. Given the unalleviatedly barbarous history of every world we have ever encountered with anything resembling Man in it, this is a statement of quite breathtakingly casual retrospective and ongoing cruelty, tantamount to the condonation of the most severe and unforgivable sadism.

“There are no guarantees in war,” Green said.

“Oh, there are,” blue said quietly, looking away into the darkness. “It’s just that they guarantee death, destruction, suffering, heartache and remorse.”

Pain, or even just discomfort, is like the warning sent by a frontier guard, sir. You are free to choose to ignore it, but you should not be unduly surprised if you are subsequently over-run by invaders.

The school of suffering tempers the spirit, the arena of combat strengthens the soul.

You must shatter the vase to spread its perfume, and smite the rock to get the spark.

Maybe you have to know darkness before you can appreciate the light.

No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.

Seven years ago we all went through the flames. And the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured.

One must reflect deeply on the nature of the adversity, and on how it may be converted into an instrument for growth. The routine Gandhiji set for himself was always so much stricter and so much more demanding than anything that a jailer would have thought of imposing on anyone. Similarly, picture Vinoba in solitary confinement in that cell, 8 feet by 9 feet in dimension: how he converts imprisonment into ashram life; how in that tiny space, in forced and complete isolation, he retains his mental discipline by meditating for two to three hours every day; how he disciplines himself physically by walking every day for eight hours inside that suffocating cell, and thereby covering ten miles—covering ten miles in a cell 8 feet by 9 feet every single day! In both cases, control remained in the hands of the prisoner, not the jailer—a very important factor in dealing with adversity.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape.

I wanted to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love.