Pain quotes
8.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside pain — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"In this crazy world, there's an enormous distinction between good times and bad, between sorrow and joy. But in the eyes of God, they're never separated. Where there is pain, there is healing. Where there is mourning, there is dancing. Where there is poverty, there is the kingdom."
"The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentists drill."
"Much of your pain is self-chosen."
"When Black and White are colors and not races, people will still fall in love and discriminate between partners and feel sad and bad and need art that breaks your heart and takes you to those places where pain becomes beauty."
"That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing."
"I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one."
"My duty moves along with my song: I am I am not: that is my destiny. I exist not if I do not attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed, I come from the people and I sing for them: my poetry is song and punnishment."
"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own."
"I'm a fatheaded guy, full of pain. It tore me up not having you."
"That we may give our body and our blood over to suffering and pain, like Christ - not for Self, but to give harvests of peace and justice to our People."
"Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes."
"Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go."
"Till taught by pain, men know not water's worth."
"Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible."
"It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us - waking and sleeping - who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, thought crime, just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick, as apparently we are - and then order us, on pain of eternal torture to be well again. To demand this, to wish this to be true is to wish to live as an abject slave."
"Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation."
"Under the seams runs the pain."
"...mothers are often fondest of the child which has caused them the greatest pain."
"Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful."
"Remember that pain has this most excellent quality. If prolonged it cannot be severe, and if severe it cannot be prolonged."
