Human Suffering Quotes

It wasn't you I was bowing to, but the whole of human suffering. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The ultimate cause of human suffering is based on the internal structure of the mind. All causes of the discomfort and distress mainly come from the inner world. Given that the human brain is a necessary and sufficient cause of the human mind, in general, a person should begin with a reconfiguration of the brain if he or she wants to avoid all the sufferings in life. Remember that the brain is the ultimate cure for all suffering. ~ Elmar Hussein

... ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.
I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel.
To approach this paradoxial point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.
It is a beast this thing that stirs in the core of our being, but it is also the star of our innermost nature.
We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlock the star.
~Thomas Moore *Care of the Soul* ~ Thomas Moore

Medicine--and particularly hospital medicine, which lives in a sea of human suffering--has a way of beating callowness out of even the most self-possessed youth. ~ Charles Krauthammer

In regard to duties, if we all agreed that every one has a duty not to hasten death, then we could properly conclude it is wrong to hasten death regardless of the consequences. And we could properly conclude that it is wrong to assist such a death. But we do not all agree. Some of us believe our duty is to relieve human suffering or to allow freedom of human choice and that aid in dying is consistent with that duty. ~ Byron Chell

A lot of the roads, bridges, railways, and such are built through the use of forced labor, and that is causing the people great suffering. What we put into this in the form of human suffering is not worth what comes out of it. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

Human suffering is a positive thing, which requires a positive answer, and sad as it is, the word is beautiful, because of the absolute truth it contains.[...] It is an error to believe that we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain? ~ Henri Barbusse

And Christ, through His own salvific suffering, is very much present in every human suffering, and can act from within that suffering by the powers of His Spirit of truth, His consoling spirit. ~ Pope John Paul II

People say that the monetary system produces incentive. This may be true in limited areas, but it also produces greed, embezzlement, corruption, pollution, jealousy, anger, crime, war, poverty, tremendous scarcity, and unnecessary human suffering. You have to look at the entire picture. ~ Jacque Fresco

But if the world measures a refugee according to the worst story, we will always excuse human suffering, saying it is not yet as bad as someone else's. ~ Victoria Armour-Hileman

Some will protest that in a world with so much human suffering, it is something between eccentric and obscene to mourn a dog. I think not. After all, it is perfectly normal - indeed, deeply human - to be moved when nature presents us with a vision of great beauty. Should we not be moved when it produces a vision - a creature - of the purest sweetness? ~ Charles Krauthammer

In the dream of the planet it is normal for humans to suffer, to live in fear, and to create emotional dramas. The outside dream is not a pleasant dream; it is a dream of violence, a dream of fear, a dream of war, a dream of injustice. The personal dream of humans will vary, but globally it is mostly a nightmare. If we look at human society we see a place so difficult to live in because it is ruled by fear. Throughout the world we see human suffering, anger, revenge, addictions, violence in the street, and tremendous injustice. It may exist at different levels in different countries around the world, but fear is controlling the outside dream. ~ Miguel Ruiz

The question haunts me still, and will, I suppose, until I join my parents in our final reunion. If the doctor had known what horrors awaited us not only at the cemetery that night, but in the days to come, would he still have insisted upon my company? Would he still have demanded that a mere child dive so deep into the well of human suffering and sacrifice - a literal sea of blood? And if the answer to that question is yes, then there are more terrifying monstrosities in the world than Anthropophagi. Monstrosities who, with a smile and a comforting pat on the head, are willing to sacrifice a child upon the altar of their own overweening ambition and pride. ~ Rick Yancey

The problem with loneliness is that, unlike other forms of human suffering, it teaches us nothing, leads us nowhere, and generally devalues us in our own eyes and the eyes of others. ~ Adam Bagdasarian

It is logical to say that ignorance seems to be the root cause of all human suffering. ~ Kat Lahr

That the language of the poetry of Jamaican music is rastafarian or biblical language cannot simply be put down to the colonizer and his satanic missionaries. The fact is that the historical experience of the black Jamaican is an experience of the most acute human suffering, desolation and despair in the cruel world that is the colonial world ... ~ Linton Kwesi Johnson

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. 'The cross of Christ ... is God's only self-justification in such a world" as ours....' 'The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone. ~ John R.W. Stott

All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of no-where-nearly-enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus. ~ Philip Yancey

Genuine transcendence doesn't just look away from human suffering and say, "I am at peace, so I'm at the mountaintop." Genuine transcendence looks human suffering in the eye and attains peace because of a faith in things unseen. ~ Marianne Williamson

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere. ~ Elie Wiesel

U.S. military spending, which consumes half of all discretionary spending, has had a profound social and political cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debt threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering is the price for victory, which is never finally defined or attainable. ~ Chris Hedges

There was so much human suffering in these scenes that I could not respond to it. ~ Philip Caputo

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.
The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. ~ Richard Dawkins

If to "aestheticize" is to glide across brutality and cruelty, treat them merely as dramatic occasions for the artist rather than structures of power to be revealed and dismantled - much hangs on the words "merely" and "rather than." Opportunism isn't the same as committed attention. But we can also define the "aesthetic" not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, that totalizing systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what's still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched. ~ Adrienne Rich

When it comes to human suffering, appearance is everything. ~ Nadja Sam

My soul, if thou wouldst be enlarged into human sympathy, thou must be narrowed into limits of human suffering. Joseph's dungeon is the road to Joseph's throne. Thou canst not lift the iron load of thy brother if the iron hath not entered into thee. It is thy limit that is thine enlargement. It is the shadows of thy life that are the real fulfillment of thy dreams of glory. Murmur not at the shadows; they are better revelations than thy dreams. Say not that the shades of the prison-house have fettered thee; thy fetters are wings -- wings of flight into the bosom of humanity. The door of thy prison-house is a door into the heart of the universe. God has enlarged thee by the binding of sorrow's chain ~ George Matheson

Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering. ~ Richard Dawkins

Whatever the capacity for human suffering, the church has a greater capacity for healing and wholeness. ~ Bill Hybels

The existence of Slavery in its most cruel form among them, has a tendency to brutalize the humane and finer feelings of their nature. Daily witnesses of human suffering - listening to the agonizing screeches of the slave - beholding him writhing beneath the merciless lash - bitten and torn by dogs - dying without attention, and buried without shroud or coffin - it cannot otherwise be expected, ~ Solomon Northup

I was not always that way, but perhaps the shadow Earth, where I spent so many years, mellowed me a bit, and maybe my hitch in the dungeons of Amber reminded me somewhat of the quality of human suffering. I do not know. I only know that I could not pass by the hurt I saw on the form of someone much like someone who had once been a friend. ~ Roger Zelazny

He who is indifferent to the suffering of others is a traitor to that which is truly human. ~ Saadi

And yet our existence is so organized that every personal enjoyment is purchased at the price of human suffering contrary to human nature. ~ Leo Tolstoy

If we can reduce the cost and improve the quality of medical technology through advances in nanotechnology, we can more widely address the medical conditions that are prevalent and reduce the level of human suffering. ~ Ralph Merkle

[ ... ] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness. ~ Albert Camus

We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering. ~ Terryl L. Givens

We are free, but not to be evil, not to be indifferent to human suffering, not to profit from the people, from the work created and sustained through their spirit of political association, while refusing to contribute to the political state that we profit from. ~ Jose Marti

Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful sexy women or handsome Porsche-owning men often prove to have miserable genes for other traits ~ Jared Diamond

Ascetics and fakirs come to mitigate human suffering; to heal us and lead us on the path. They put up with criticism; they go through many worldly trials. Some of them have even become martyrs for our sake. But they have done all this with a smile and with gratitude to God. Hence sacrifice is a great virtue. ~ Sadhu Vaswani

Human kindness has no reward. You should give to others in every way you see. expect absolutely nothing from anyone. It should be your goal to love every human you encounter. All human suffering that you're aware of and continues without your effort to stop it becomes your crime. ~ Louis C.K.

It is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

You can't use your camera as a shield against human suffering ... ~ Zana Briski

Nations customarily measure the "costs of war" in dollars, lost production, or the number of soldiers killed or wounded. Rarely do military establishments attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering. Psychiatric breakdown remains one of the most costly items of war when expressed in human terms ~ Richard A. Gabriel

The world remains beset by so much human suffering, poverty and deprivation. It is in your hands to make of our world a better one for all, especially the poor, vulnerable and marginalized. ~ Nelson Mandela

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If ~ Richard Rohr

I didn't create poverty. This church didn't create poverty. Poverty is not an issue, human suffering is not an issue at all, they were there before the creation of mankind. ~ Peter Akinola

As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering. ~ Neel Burton

The way we treat animals is the root cause of all the human suffering in the world, from poverty, starvation, disease, and war to lack of clean air and water, not to mention all the varied forms of human emotional and spiritual suffering. ~ Sharon Gannon

In the Radiation Laboratory we count it a privilege to do everything we can to assist our medical colleagues in the application of these new tools to the problems of human suffering. ~ Ernest Lawrence

All of us must do our best to live gracefully in the present moment. I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom. My pain diminished when I gave up trying to escape completely from it. However, don't interpret my current approach to depression as utterly fatalistic. I do whatever I can to dull depression's pain, while premising my life on its continuing presence. The theologian and philosopher Thomas Moore puts it well with his distinction between cure and care. While cure implies the eradication of trouble, care "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. ~ David A. Karp

Stem cell research holds enormous promise for easing human suffering, and federal support is critical to its success. ~ Tom Harkin

Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people "acknowledge, experience, and bear" the reality of life - with all its pleasures and heartbreak. "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves," he'd say, urging us to be honest with ourselves about every facet of our experience. He often said that people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel. I ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

It seems to be that when these communist regimes take over - if you look at the example of Vietnam or Cambodia or Nicaragua - that even in conditions of peace they don't seem to be able to figure out how to support their people, and the human suffering is enormous. ~ John Negroponte

To me, the view that Buddhist teachings are somehow religious, requiring some form of blind belief, and that you would have to relinquish other spiritual practices in order to pursue them fully, is neither accurate nor helpful. It's not accurate because the Buddha's central thesis was humanistic; he focused clearly on human suffering and the causes of that suffering. At the same time, viewing Buddhism as a religion is not helpful. People from all walks of life become interested in the vast array of Buddhist ethical, philosophical, and psychological teachings, and to declare that they cannot fully participate because they are also exploring another spirituality is severely confining and unnecessary. ~ Ethan Nichtern

If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering. ~ Dennis Prager

All human suffering is a variation on this theme - trying to control the waves, trying to control our present-moment experience so it conforms to our ideas and concepts of how it should be. If you want to suffer, compare this moment with your image of how it should be! I ~ Jeff Foster

There were outlaws too; men too slothful to work and too selfish to care who they harmed or how much human suffering they caused. ~ C.M. Curtis

I had to wonder what sadistic pleasure and entertainment human suffering must provide to the divine game players who decided the fate of their pawns in a board game they made of life. ~ Clyde DeSouza

Walk the Bowery under the El at night and all you feel is a sort of cold guilt. Touched for a dime, you try to drop the coin and not touch the hand, because the hand is dirty; you try to avoid the glance, because the glance accuses. This is not so much personal menace as universal - the cold menace of unresolved human suffering and poverty and the advanced stages of the disease alcoholism. ~ E.B. White

But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative - the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory - it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we're to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it. ~ Michael Copperman

Nothing whatsoever, not even the existence of God to His lovers, can be proved, but that every man, if he is to live at all finely, must deliberately adopt certain assertions as true, and those assertions should, for the sake of the enrichment of the human race, always be creative ones. He may, as life goes on, modify his beliefs, but he must never modify them on the side of destruction. It may be difficult, in the face of the problem of human suffering, to believe in God ... but if you destroy God you do not solve your problem but merely leave yourself alone with it ... A ghastly loneliness. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

Yet her father had taught her that failing to act in the face of human suffering is inhuman. ~ Corban Addison

Yet tears to human suffering are due; And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone. ~ William Wordsworth

Hezbollah's contempt for human suffering is total, as it showed once again this morning when its rockets murdered two Israeli Arab children in Nazareth. ~ Tom Lantos

...suffering is not a problem that can be solved therapeutically; it is not a matter of emotional conflict. Psychologists and psychotherapists deal usefully with human suffering by working on the conflicts of the personality, but from the perspective of spiritual teachings this approach clearly cannot deal with the basic problem, the root of all emotional conflicts.

When the Buddha said that life is suffering, he did not mean only neurotic suffering. He was referring to the more fundamental understanding that there is bound to be suffering in the life of the ego, because one is not seeing reality correctly; one is taking oneself to be something that actually does not exist. It is a problem of mistaken identity"
- (The Pearl Beyond Price, 28). ~ Almaas, A.H.

Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive. ~ Arthur Henderson

All of our notions of modernity and progress and all our advances in technological expertise have not brought an end to war. Our declaring the notion of sin to be obsolete has not diminished human suffering. And the easy answers: blaming technology, or, for that matter, the world's religions, have not solved the problem. The problem, C. S. Lewis insists, is us. ~ C.S. Lewis

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain. ~ George Eliot

[S]in in popular Christianity is often understood individualistically, obscuring the reality of "social sin." An emphasis upon sin most often leads to introspection about what I have done wrong. Of course, such introspection can be helpful, but it clouds the fact that much of human suffering and misery is not because of our individual sins, but because of collective sin. For example, when it is emphasized that Jesus "died for our sins" (and thus for your sins and my sins), our sins are seen as responsible for Jesus' death.

But it wasn't individual sins that caused Jesus' death. He wasn't killed because of the impure thoughts of adolescents or our everyday deceptions or our selfishness. The point is not that these don't matter. The point, rather, is that these were not what caused Jesus' death. Rather, Jesus was killed because of what might be called "social sin," namely, the domination system of his day. The common individualistic understanding of sin typically domesticates the political passion of the Bible and Jesus. ~ Marcus J. Borg

Poverty - the greatest cause of human suffering on the planet - is itself exacerbated by conflict, competition for resources, injustice, even the global downturn and climate change. Diseases like AIDS, TB and malaria cannot be tackled without adequate resources. So you see everything is connected. In order to address any major cause of human suffering, we have to work together across many fronts. ~ Desmond Tutu

Behind all sorrows in the world Klepp saw a ravenous hunger; all human suffering, he believed, could be cured with a portion of blood sausage. What quantities of fresh blood sausage with rings of onion, washed down with beer, Oskar consumed in order to make his friend think his sorrow's name was hunger and not Sister Dorothy. ~ Gunter Grass

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

How do we know that Moses was grown up? Because he went out unto his brethren, and was ready to bear the burdens and share the plight of his people. Maturity is sensitivity to human suffering. ~ Julius Gordon

Paroxysms of pain and twinges of desire leach from universal sources. All human suffering buttons itself to the pang of wanting. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If I don't understand you, I may be angry at you, all the time. We are not capable of understanding each other, and that is the main source of human suffering. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

David used to tell me that not believing in God was a defense mechanism against human suffering. It's easier to say nothing exists than to say something exists and He just lets us suffer. ~ Tarryn Fisher

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. ~ Elie Wiesel

We will have an unchallenged, open, panoramic opportunity on a global scale to demonstrate the finest aspects of what we know in this country: peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, benevolent sharing, love, the easing of human suffering.
Is that going to be our list of priorities or not? ~ Jimmy Carter

There is too much emphasis on technical perfection nowadays, and not enough on what music is actually about - irony, joy, human suffering, love. ~ Mstislav Rostropovich

Our habitual identification with thought - that is, our failure to recognize thoughts *as thoughts,* as appearances in consciousness - is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one's head. ~ Sam Harris

She's wonderful and soulful. She has a sly sense of humor. I've seen her deliver a funnier joke with a single silent raise of her eyebrow than many stand up comedians. She guards a very sensitive heart. Any human suffering brings her to tears. She's smart. Talk down to her and find yourself mentally slapped. She's an excellent judge of character, and seems to know an original spirit from a forgery every time. Cross boundaries with her...in any improper way and suffer the wrath of a lion. ... She's principled and firm. Rude behavior doesn't materialize in her presence. She's a grown-up who fully sees and knows children as citizens, and people, and souls. And because she respects children, all children seem to respect her. ~ Shonda Rhimes

The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden ... Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering. ~ Octave Mirbeau

People were entranced by flame and repelled by human suffering, and wasn't that some kind of design flaw? ~ Joe Hill

A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions. ~ James Russell Lowell

Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering. ~ Epicurus

But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God's Word. The Anti-christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell. ~ Russell Kirk

Contemplating this vast human suffering, you might be tempted to shrug your shoulders, but you could not. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Some communities don't permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, church, friends, or tribe: "We don't discuss those things here."
I believe the discussion itself is divine. Abraham does his best to bargain with God, most of the book of Job consists of arguments by Job and his friends about the deepest questions of human suffering, God is practically on trial in the book of Lamentations, and Jesus responds to almost every question he's asked with ... a question. ~ Rob Bell

EPICURUS WROTE, "Empty is that philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul. ~ Martha C. Nussbaum

In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering. ~ Sam Harris

If only the know-how could be equalled by the will-to-serve, by compassion for human suffering cause by hunger and deficiency diseases, there is no reason why fully balanced diets consisting largely of plant-foods should not be made available for hundreds of millions of undernourished people in the West as well as in the Third World. ~ Robert Hart

The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop a poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not; with its limited intelligence, it could not enter into the world of man, i.e., the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable. Then I pushed forward with the following question: 'And what about man? Are you sure that the the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man's world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer? ~ Viktor E. Frankl

A writer's life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes… you have to think: 'This novel I am writing is no good.' Then you have to think: 'All my novels are no good.' And then, when you reach that point, you can begin. ~ Martin Amis

A disciple: I am worried about human suffering all over the world. What is the solution?Spiritual leader: The solution to our miseries lie within central atom of our being, 'I'. Once this central atom transcends to 'WE', human sufferings can be resolved. ~ Santosh Kalwar

All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering ... tends instead to favor humanity's destruction. ~ Konrad Lorenz

The possibility to mobilize the international community to act on human suffering is what drives me every day as a photojournalist. ~ Lynsey Addario

Whoever, through too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of his misery, is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy. And this joy of living, because it is unnaturally acquired, is a poison which eventually vitiates the whole world. Whatever is created beyond the normal limits of human suffering, acts as a boomerang and brings about destruction. ~ Henry Miller

Not once after graduating from Bryan was I asked to make a case for the scientific feasibility of miracles, but often I was asked why Christians aren't more like Jesus. I may have met one or two people who rejected Christianity because they had difficulties with the deity of Christ, but most rejected Christianity because they thought it means becoming judgmental, narrow-minded, intolerant, and unkind. People didn't argue with me about the problem of evil; they argued about why Christians aren't doing more to alleviate human suffering, support the poor, and oppose violence and war. Most weren't looking for a faith that provided all the answers; they were looking for one in which they were free to ask questions. ~ Rachel Held Evans

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest "well pleased". ~ C.S. Lewis

The most wonderful study of mankind is man. Relieving human suffering and diffusing universal knowledge is humanitarian. ~ Daniel D. Palmer