Alleviate Suffering Quotes

Science itself, no matter whether it is the search for truth or merely the need to gain control over the external world, to alleviate suffering, or to prolong life, is ultimately a matter of feeling, or rather, of desire-the desire to know or the desire to realize. ~ Louis De Broglie

We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes - and we must. ~ Jimmy Carter

I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease. But I think that is literally half-baked. If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral. ~ Martin Seligman

I think I get angry when people cause serious suffering or don't alleviate suffering when they could. ~ Peter Singer

Our most natural state is joy. It is the foundation for love, compassion, healing, and the desire to alleviate suffering. ~ Deepak Chopra

Instead of being satisfied to alleviate suffering, we shall labor hard and continually to prevent it. ~ Helen Keller

Prayer does nothing to alleviate suffering. ~ Shusaku Endo

They are achieving nothing, they are suffering from casualties. Those casualties are increasing, not decreasing ~ Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

War demands sacrifice of the people. It gives only suffering in return. ~ Frederic C. Howe

Who can sum up all the ills the women of a nation suffer from war? They have all of the misery and none of the glory; nothing to mitigate their weary waiting and watching for the loved ones who return no more. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

To complete your daily mental hygiene, observe any part of you that is upset or anxious, and offer that part of yourself the following simple wishes: 'May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering.' Repeat this until you actually mean it. ~ Martha Beck

Do we see a college education, for example, as a ticket to privilege or as a training for service to the needy? What do we teach our teenagers in this matter? Do we urge them to enter college because it will better equip them to serve? Or do we try to bribe them with promises of future status and salary increases? No wonder they graduate more deeply concerned about their standard of living than about suffering humanity. As ~ Richard J. Foster

For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen ... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe. ~ Harriet Martineau

It is important to stress the ways that people are different from each other, because so much of the suffering that we experience in our relationships with other people is caused by the fact that we are blind to their point of view. ~ Helen Palmer

What if there are children who will suffer somehow because I failed to obey God? What if my cowardice costs even one child somewhere in the world his or her life? ~ Richard Stearns

If a memory or a particular sadness we feel is capable of disappearing, to the point where we no longer notice it, it can also return and sometimes remain there for a long time. There were evenings when, as I crossed the town on my way to the restaurant, I felt so great a pang of longing for Mme de Guermantes that it took my breath away: it was as if part of my breast had been cut out by a skilled anatomist and replaced by an equal part of immaterial suffering, by an equivalent degree of nostalgia and love. And however neat the surgeon's stitches are, life is rather painful when longing for another person is substituted for the intestines; it seems to occupy more space than they do; it is a constantly felt presence; and then, how utterly unsettling it is to be obliged to think with part of the body! Yet it does somehow make us feel more authentic. ~ Marcel Proust

Look at your body - A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings. - The Dhammapada ~ Thomas Ligotti

O Lord do not abandon us. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell ... lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Success and suffering are vitally and organically linked. If you succeed without suffering, it is because someone suffered for you; if you suffer without succeeding, it is in order that someone else may succeed after you. ~ Edward Judson

Compassion allows us to use our own pain and the pain of others as a vehicle for connection. This is a delicate and profound path. We may be adverse to seeing our own suffering because it tends to ignite a blaze of self-blame and regret. And we may be adverse to seeing suffering in others because we find it unbearable or distasteful, or we find it threatening to our own happiness. All of these possible reactions to the suffering in the word make us want to turn away from life. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I felt great empathy for my friend, as one form of cancer after another emerged to challenge him. I felt sympathy for his suffering that surely clawed at his daily routines, always active and busy, but he rarely verbalized complaints while courageously challenging his archenemy. He met pain and physical decline with 600-calorie workouts; he discarded anxieties somewhere along innumerable running trails; he faced death by running through life at full stride. ~ Brent Green

You see misery, you see misfortune, you see pain, you see suffering. It's all part of the fatalistic way of looking at life. ~ Ravi Zacharias

One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Our scars reveal who we are. The fact that we have experienced profound suffering in life - the fact that we carry what may seem to be unsightly scars - does not disqualify us from following Jesus. It may be precisely what qualifies us. ~ Jonathan Martin

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ~ William James

I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws. ~ Laura Lippman

When you hate, the only person that suffers is you because most of the people you hate don't know it and the rest don't care. ~ Medgar Evers

If the angels were capable of envy, they would envy us for two things: one is the receiving of Holy Communion, and the other is suffering. ~ Maria Faustina Kowalska

Our body has this defect that, the more it is provided care and comforts, the more needs and desires it finds. ~ Saint Teresa Of Avila

If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be the precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well ~ Robert M. Pirsig

They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined? ~ C.S. Lewis

God loves you enough , trusts you enough, to let affliction come into your life to see whether you will exercise the muscles of faith while your physical muscles begin to atrophy. ~ John Howe

To reconcile conflicting parties, we must have the ability to understand the suffering of both sides. If we take sides, it is impossible to do the work of reconciliation. And humans want to take sides. That is why the situation gets worse and worse. Are there people who are still available to both sides? They need not do much. They need do only one thing: Go to one side and tell all about the suffering endured by the other side, and go to the other side and tell all about the suffering endured by this side. This is our chance for peace. But how many of us are able to do that? ~ Nhat Hanh

Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked. ~ Christopher McDougall

Compassion- which means, literally, "to suffer with"- is the way to the truth that we are most ourselves, not when we differ from others, but when we are the same. Indeed the main spiritual question is not, "What difference do you make?" but "What do you have in common?" It is not "excelling" but "serving" that makes us most human. It is not proving ourselves to be better than others but confessing to be just like others that is the way to healing and reconciliation. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

I believe we have inherited a world of suffering that must be transcended through the development of pointed direction, fostering an evolution to a higher level of consciousness. ~ Albert Jackson

A particularly difficult line to navigate is the one between fear and love, especially for parents, who want more than anything to protect their children from suffering. ~ Sharon Salzberg

No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well. ~ Sebastian Junger

I wish we had loved Johnny more when he was alive. Of course we loved Johnny very much. Johnny knew that. Everybody knew it. Loving Johnny more. What does it mean, now?

Parents all over the earth who lost sons in the war have felt this kind of question, and sought an answer. To me, it means loving life more, being more aware of life, of one's fellow human beings, of the earth.

It means obliterating, in a curious but real way, the ideas of evil and hate and the enemy, and transmuting them, with the alchemy of suffering, into ideas of clarity and charity.

It means caring more and more about other people, at home and abroad, all over the earth. It means caring more about God. ~ John Gunther

I have met people who truly do not believe in God, and they feel no anger when they see suffering. They are indifferent to it. But you and I are angry. Anger is not indifference. I blamed God because He took my family. But I couldn't get revenge from God, so I turned my rage against other people. I wanted revenge. Someone must pay."

"You're wrong." Helen said, wanting desperately to believe that he was. "I told you, I no longer believe in God."

"Then why are you so angry with Him?" His eyes were so sorrowful that Helen had to look away. She was unable to reply.

"You blame me and my country for your losses Miss Kimball. And I blame you and your country. But you and I are people, not countries. Did you kill my wife? My child? Would you put a gun to their heads and shoot them, or take away all of their food and watch them die? No, of course not. Neither would I kill someone you loved if I met him face to face. Wars come from bitterness and hatred. They are started by nations without face. But wars end when the hatred ends in the hearts of people like you and me. That is why I ask you to please forgive me. ~ Lynn Austin

That's what sacrifice is - beauty and tragedy. It's pain and suffering for something or someone you love. And ~ M. Leighton

Never will the Anarchists in Spain be made to suffer as they have been and are in Russia. ~ Federica Montseny

Real education starts when you genuinely feel the pain and sufferings of the people and living beings in flood, famine, poverty, disease, exploitation, and hunger. Spirituality begins when you take positive actions to remove that pain and suffering. ~ Amit Ray

Depression is a devastating illness, causing great suffering in the afflicted and anxiety to their nearest and dearest: it can hit at any age. ~ John Cornwell

I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The clouds were drifting over the moon at their giddiest speed, at one time wholly obscuring her, at another, suffering her to burst forth in full splendor and shed her light on all the objects around; anon, driving over her again, with increased velocity, and shrouding everything in darkness. ~ Charles Dickens

all of the want and suffering in the world-all of it-arises not from the earth's inability to produce but from our inability to share. ~ Hope Jahren

Happiness. The enemy of all suffering. ~ Rebecca Serle