Pain quotes
8.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside pain — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"If you are tossed about by doubts, full of strong thoughtless passions, and yearning only for that which is detrimental, your thirst will grow stronger and stronger, unquenched, and your pain will grow with your defilements."
"It is ignorance that smothers, and it is carelessness that makes it invisible. The hunger of craving pollutes the world, and the pain of suffering causes the greatest fear."
"Listening is a very deep practice. You have to empty yourself. You have to leave space in order to listen especially to people we think are our enemies - the ones we believe are making our situation worse. When you have shown your capacity for listening and understanding, the other person will begin to listen to you, and you have a change to tell him or her of your pain, and it's your turn to be healed. This is the practice of peace."
"If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. It is in your power to erase this judgment about it. If anything in your own nature gives you pain, you are who hinders you from correcting your opinion."
"Being a Christ follower means being acquainted with sorrow. We must know sorrow to be able to fully appreciate joy. Joy costs pain, but the pain is worth it. After all, the murder had to take place before the resurrection."
"Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions."
"We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation."
"There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder."
"Actors have an opportunity to use storytelling as a way to solve pain."
"I think that if you do the best you can in your life, you get your just reward. You sometimes give up a great deal to achieve a plane you're looking for. But if you find that it's important enough, then you do it. You have to decide. Even when you figure you've given up a great deal to get a small amount of something, the pain is only there for a short time. It really goes away. Whatever the quandary, it leaves you."
"Ministry means the ongoing attempt to put one's own search for God, with all the moments of pain and joy, despair and hope, at the disposal of those who want to join this search but do not know how."
"It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth."
"He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed."
"After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again."
"We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another's pain, sharing one another's blessings — reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political affiliation."
"Don't care about all the pain in front of me, cause I'm just trying to be happy."
"In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame."
"The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone that has produced all the elevations of humanity so far?"
"Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?"
"I smoke till I got chest pains"
