Life Suffering Quotes

The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering. ~ Agatha Christie

All suffering goes just as it came. So it is with the glories and tragedies of the world. ~ Paulo Coelho

Even suffering when wrapped in love, seems tolerable. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

O, my Jesus, I understand well that, just as illness is measured with a thermometer and a high fever tells us of the seriousness of the illness; so also, in the spiritual life, suffering is the thermometer which measures the love of God in a soul. ~ Mary Faustina Kowalska

Happy people know suffering more than anyone else, and that's how they can see just how damn beautiful their lives are. It's because they've seen the depths. ~ Brianna Wiest

No matter what choices we make in life, suffering is always a part of what follows. ~ Christine Johnson

You feel your strength in the experience of pain. ~ Jim Morrison

I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I don't feel like I can change the world. I don't even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering. ~ Somaly Mam

The Scriptures teach us the best way of living, the noblest way of suffering, and the most comfortable way of dying. ~ John Flavel

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose. ~ Walter Kaufmann

The web of life, love, suffering and death unites all beings. ~ Alex Grey

It's good to be reminded that the world is full of stories that are, potentially, at least as painful as yours. ~ Stephanie Butland

The ugly truth when I discovered that I've spent most of my life suffering from fears,Unjustified fears i mean. ~ Mohammed Sekouty

On our earth we can only love withsuffering and through suffering. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

It is often said that having gone through any kind of suffering tends to makes you appreciate life more and live more in the present. I'm not sure how universal or long-lasting these effects really are. ~ Julian Baggini

Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers. ~ Eleanor Catton

Lorcan rose to his feet, swaying again. But Elide was there. And there was nothing of the young woman he'd come to know in her pale, taut face. Nothing of her in the raw voice as Elide said to Lorcan, "I hope you spend the rest of your miserable, immortal life suffering. I hope you spend it alone. I hope you live with regret and guilt in your heart and never find a way to endure it." Then ~ Sarah J. Maas

Fate demands that we continue suffering, until we willingly seek out and discover the sacred path of righteousness. Until we surrender to the sameness of life, we are unable to experience the absolute ground zero of reality. Only by surrendering our desires, by readjusting our consciousness to a state undefined, unbound, and unmotivated by passion and desire, will we experience life transformed. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering. ~ Madame De Stael

Are you not tired as I am of waking up every morning and seeing the sun all over again? Tired of living the same life, suffering the same sorrow? Tired of desiring, and tired of being sated? Tired of waiting, and tired of possessing? ~ Gustave Flaubert

You need to learn to be with the suffering that inevitably arises in your life. ~ Eckhart Tolle

No person can escape the germs of their eventual deterioration and destruction. A round-table of physical breakdown and death awaits the rich person and the poor person, as well as the common people and world leaders. The skulls of noble men and savages alike litter the streets of ancient cities. Modern humans live longer than the ancient people did, but eventually we all succumb to the same wretched infirmities. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we're alert. This gift is always present in anyone's life, that moment when 'It's not the way I want it! ~ Charlotte Joko Beck

Good Friday and Easter free us to think about other things far beyond our own personal fate, about the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and events; and we lay hold of a great hope. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The reason many people suffer is not that life is too tough; it's that they haven't found something worth living for. ~ Alexander Den Heijer

I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I'm doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situations that occur. And if you just say 'ok, here I am, I'm going to experience the pain,' you don't suffer. The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering. ~ Hubert Selby, Jr.

As long as one suffers one lives. ~ Graham Greene

If you think about life simply as one big waiting room for eternity, who cares if it's not fully air conditioned? ~ Joyce Rachelle

I think people who suffer from depression, unless it's post-traumatic, are probably going to struggle with it for their whole life. ~ Christina Ricci

It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive. ~ Judy Collins

A basis for much of the pain women suffer in real life is they must somehow resolve their devotion to men. ~ Billy Cannon

Ah, life, you make us suffer to love you more. ~ Debasish Mridha

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life. ~ Albert Camus

Being a dandy is a condition rather than a profession. It is a defense against suffering and a celebration of life. ~ Sebastian Horsley

No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain; not until they get the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through the lives of men; not until then does Christianity enter upon its true trial and become ready to show what it can do. ~ Phillips Brooks

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. ~ Thomas Hardy

I am the perpretor of my suffering - but only all of it. ~ Byron Katie

Pain is part of life. Suffering is an option. ~ Tony Robbins

The injuries we do and those we suffer are seldom weighed in the same scales. ~ Aesop

We are made of flesh that bruises and bleeds, bones that break, and a mind that is susceptible to wild mood swings. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Suffering without understanding in this life is a heap worse than suffering when you have at least the grain of an idea what it's all for. ~ Mary Ellen Chase

The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering. ~ Melvin Jules Bukiet

It is my fundamental belief that all human beings share the same basic aspirations: that we all want hapiness and that we all share suffering. Asians, just like Americans, Europeans, and the rest of the world, share a desire to live life to its fullest, to better ourselves and the lives of our loved ones. ~ Dalai Lama

If something came out of the deal, it couldn't make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn't have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom. ~ Haruki Murakami

The wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of the world, and I see - this, all this, is what the French call d'un beau affreux, what the Germans call hubsch-hasslich - the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as 'Le laid peut etre beau' - The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace. ~ Ann Voskamp

What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering. For weeks, Marianne, I've had this pressing on me without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature. It was forced on me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hope. I have endured her exultations again and again whilst knowing myself to be divided from Edward forever. Believe me, Marianne, had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you. ~ Jane Austen

Violence is not just an emotion, it is a culture. Some suffer in it, some are born into it and others cannot live without it. ~ Isabella Poretsis

For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream. He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror. ~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

Suffering often clarifies what really matters in life. ~ Skip Prichard

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased. ~ Pema Chodron

All of us suffer some injuries from experiences that seem to have no rhyme or reason. We cannot understand or explain them. We may never know why some things happen in this life. The reason for some of our suffering is known only to the Lord. ~ James E. Faust

We rise up
And we fall down
Only to rise again ~ Karen Hackel

God has hewn out a hidden path more glorious, tantalizing and adventuresome than the path trod by most, and it is a path seen only through the eyes of our wounds, felt solely through the heart of our losses, and singularly traversed by those with a limp in their step. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Sometimes we are too polite with our suffering and allow it to dominate our life. ~ Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

Perhaps," you will add, grinning, "those who have never been slapped will also not understand" - thereby politely hinting that I, too, may have experienced a slap in my life, and am therefore speaking as a connoisseur. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do. ~ Philip Yancey

I hope you spend the rest of your miserable, immortal life suffering. I hope you spend it alone. I hope you live with regret and guilt in your heart and never find a way to endure it. ~ Sarah J. Maas

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not. ~ Katherine Anne Porter

Fateful encounters with a cruel world reveal our character. No human is immune from heartbreaking loss. Regardless of our socioeconomic status, eventually everybody shall suffer a grievous personal loss, a body blow that inflicts pain of inexpressible magnitude. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Pain is painful but an essential ingredient of life. Suffering is optional. ~ Debasish Mridha

Change is a good thing. It's good to have a fresh start, even if it's painful sometimes. ~ Jen Calonita

At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze. ~ John Green

Those who have suffered in the hands of others,know what it is to be free. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells - he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. ~ Ted Hughes

This is the testimony of all the good books, sermons, hymns, and memoirs I read
that God's ways are infinitely perfect; that we are to love Him for what He is and therefore equally as much when He afflicts as when He prospers us; that there is no real happiness but in doing and suffering His will; and that this life is but a scene of probation through which we pass to the real life above. ~ Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what's irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course ... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. ~ John Green

It seemed to him that no matter what evils a man had committed, making him suffer purely for the sake of suffering was pointless. It didn't undo the harm he had wrought; it didn't please anyone or improve anyone's life. ~ Kim Fielding

I made an appointment with a sleep doctor, who explained that during the sleep study people would be watching me sleep and monitoring my brain waves to see how I reacted during the four stages of sleep. I'd explain those stages if I could spell all the complicated words but they basically range from "Wide awake" to "Just barely not dead."

My sleep cycle is a bit more elaborate.

The seven stages of sleep (according to my body)

STAGE 1: You take the maximum dose of sleeping pills, but they don't work at all and then you glare at their smug bottles at three a.m., whispering, "You lying bastards."

STAGE 2: You fall asleep for eight minutes and you have that dream where you've missed a semester of classes and don't know where you're supposed to be and when you wake up you realize that even in your sleep you're fucking your life up.

STAGE 3: You close your eyes for just a minute but never lose consciousness and then you open your eyes and realize it's been hours since you closed your eyes and you feel like you've lost time and were probably abducted by aliens.

STAGE 4: This is the sleep that you miss because you're too busy looking up "Symptoms of Alien Abduction" on your phone.

STAGE 5: This is the deep REM sleep that recharges you completely and doesn't actually exist but is made up by other people to taunt you.

STAGE 6: You hover in a state of half sleep when you're trying to stay under but ~ Jenny Lawson

So much does the moral health depend upon the moral atmosphere that is breathed, and so great is the influence daily exercised by parents over their children by living a life before their eyes, that perhaps the best system of parental instruction might be summed up in these two words: 'Improve thyself.' ~ Samuel Smiles

I think what most people miss, and what I missed last time, are the people that are important in your life. You know, the relationships you have with people on the ground. ~ Scott Kelly

You've got every right to a beautiful life ~ Taylor Swift

He who suffers wins in politics. The martyr does not obtain the victory personally, but his group, his successors, win in the long run. ~ Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

God is in everyone. God is in you and you are God. Strengthen this fundamental truth. When you propagate this truth, that is the real service. It is the service that will take you to closer proximity, a boat. In this ocean of life, take the help of this boat and gain the proximity. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

Will we act upon life, or will we merely be acted upon? ~ Stephen Covey

She laughed and said how silly we were to not accept life for what it was, difficult. ~ Pepper Phillips

So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. ~ Arthur Koestler

This has been the freakin' longest night of my life," I said with dismay. "Yeah," he replied. "And it's not over yet. ~ D.J. MacHale

Just because the boat rocks doesn't mean it's time to jump overboard. ~ Suzanne Woods Fisher

The State is not, as many political scientists would make it, an inanimate thing; it consists of people, human beings, each of whom operates under an inner compulsion to get the most out of life with the least expenditure of labor. ~ Frank Chodorov

God seemed to be having a hard time killing him, and he'd be damned if he was going to make the job easy for mere mortals ~ Mario Puzo

The gospel, if it is really believed, removes neediness - the need to be constantly respected, appreciated, and well regarded; the need to have everything in your life go well; the need to have power over others. All of these great, deep needs continue to control you only because the concept of the glorious God delighting in you with all His being is just that - a concept and nothing more. Our hearts don't believe it, so they operate in default mode. Paul is saying that if you want to really change, you must let the gospel teach you - that is to train, discipline, coach you - over a period of time. You must let the gospel argue with you. You must let the gospel sink down deeply into your heart, until it changes your motivation and views and attitudes. ~ Timothy Keller

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsicordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move. ~ Michael Donaghy

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations. ~ Anais Nin

The hard part is that I lost myself. In the midst of life happening all around me, I lost the ability to be okay, I lost the ability to trust. I lost the ability to love myself, and when that happens, you lose everything. And when the one person in the entire world who loves you unconditionally is gone, then you start wondering who will love you? And then when you start wondering, you get scared that you have to even ask that question. But since you have already asked yourself that, you can't ignore it. Who will love you now? Who could possibly love everything about you, now that the only person in the world who could, is gone? Hell, you don't even love yourself. Why would someone else? And then when you realize that, the relationship you're in seems pointless. Because you start believing that they won't ever be able to withstand your problems and craziness. And then that snowballs to even more insecurities and fear, and you feel trapped in this broken body that can't ever be healed. And then you feel lost, torn, broken, unfixable, damaged, and like nothing in the entire world could ever possibly be okay again. Because you know from the past, that even when everything seems okay, another devastating blow comes around again and knocks you back down. So you feel even smaller, even weaker. By that point you're at the bottom, you're looking up in tears, ready to scream for help. But you're not sure who's going to be there, and if the person who does show up, is going to be the pe ~ Sabrina K

Men look to love and life for everything; they receive a little less than that; they imagine that they have received nothing: these are the three stages of the pessimist. ~ Will Durant

The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Psychologically there is nothing in the world, that you can put your faith, your trust, or your belief in. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Life is a miracle. YOU are a unique expression of this purposeful miracle. Think of how GREAT that makes you. Live big! You are not here to dwell within the basement of your potentiality. ~ Steve Maraboli

Life-change list Number Five: Don't forget the care and feeding of friends. ~ Kaira Rouda

The Fire

When a human is asked about a particular fire,
she comes close:
then it is too hot,
so she turns her face -

and that's when the forest of her bearable life appears,
always on the other side of the fire. The fire
she's been asked to tell the story of,
she has to turn from it, so the story you hear
is that of pines and twitching leaves
and how her body is like neither -

all the while there is a fire
at her back
which she feels in fine detail,
as if the flame were a dremel
and her back its etching glass.

You will not know all about the fire
simply because you asked.
When she speaks of the forest
this is what she is teaching you,

you who thought you were her master. ~ Katie Ford

If you are in hard times, ask yourself: "What would this problem and my life mean to people two hundred years from now? ~ Catherine B. Roy

All my life, men have told me I wasn't pretty enough - even the men I was dating. And I'd be like, 'Well, why are you with me, then?' It's always been men putting me down just like my dad. To this day when someone says I'm cute, I can't see it. I don't see it no matter what anybody says. ~ Lil' Kim

We were promised that we would have Jehovah, Jesus Christ, as our Savior and Redeemer. He would assure that we would all be resurrected. And He would make it possible for us to pass the test of life if we exercised faith in Him by being obedient. ~ Henry B. Eyring

Clarissa remembered why she didn't like him, he was astucious, an ambiguous villain in a gentleman's three piece suit. ~ Vera Jane Cook

I had dreams as well. In that moment, right there and then, I admitted to myself that I longed for more for my life and maybe those dreams were beautiful too. Brave. I had always pushed that desire away, ashamed of it, thinking it sinful, selfish.
But maybe, just maybe, my own dreams weren't as sinful as I'd always thought them to be…somehow. ~ Mia Sheridan

We live in a world when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. ~ Oscar Wilde

Life is a work in progress. ~ Jeff Rich