Suffering Quotes

Here are quotes on suffering:

“There is an ancient tribal proverb I once heard in India. It says that before we can see properly we must first shed our tears to clear the way.”
― Libba Bray

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
― Marcel Proust

“There is no beauty in sadness. No honor in suffering. No growth in fear. No relief in hate. It’s just a waste of perfectly good happiness.”
― Katerina Stoykova Klemer

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
― James Baldwin

“The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love. That’s the message we’re brought up with, isn’t it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.”
― Bill Hicks

“Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. ”
― James Frey

“You will suffer, son of Hades!’
What else is new? Nico thought.”
― Rick Riordan

“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.”
― Laura Hillenbrand

“Time is not the great teacher. Experience is. A man may live a whole life, but if he never leaves his home to experience that life, he dies knowing nothing. A mere child who has suffered and lived can be the wiser of the two.”
― Lynsay Sands

“I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words.”
― John Milton

“Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.”
― Dodie Smith

“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.”
― Hermann Hesse

“There are many who don’t wish to sleep for fear of nightmares. Sadly, there are many who don’t wish to wake for the same fear.”
― Richelle Goodrich

“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”
― Aldous Huxley

“How can one be well…when one suffers morally?”
― Leo Tolstoy

“It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.”
― Ann Voskamp

“A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.”
― Criss Jami

“If pain doesn’t lead to humility, you have wasted your suffering.”
― Katerina Stoykova Klemer

“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.”
― bell hooks

“If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.”
― William Faulkner

“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.”
― William Styron

“Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“There are some wounds that one can heal only by deepening them and making them worse.”
― Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam

“A disciplined mind leads to happiness, and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.”
― Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

“Injustice in the end produces independence.”
― Voltaire

“I want to suffer so that I may love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Never stop just because you feel defeated. The journey to the other side is attainable only after great suffering.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.”
― Ben Okri

“Nothing forces us to know
What we do not want to know
Except pain”
― Aeschylus

“There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.”
― Isaac Asimov

“We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world–the company of those who have known suffering.”
― Helen Keller

“When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist.”
― Noah Cicero

“Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering.”
― Becca Fitzpatrick

“It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.”
― Natsume Sōseki

“Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in the
world. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.”
― Seneca

“No one is ever holy without suffering.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn’t write a novel, people said I couldn’t write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering. The world is out of joint.”
― Osamu Dazai

“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
― John Berger

“I’m a soldier,’ Nathan said. ‘We’re all soldiers, now. Soldiers don’t leave people behind.”
― Barry Kirwan

“Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.”
― Léon Bloy

“The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.”
― Neal Shusterman

“It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.”
― Samuel Beckett