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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"The mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry or discourse concerning the others: and if we think ofa wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it."
"Most human behavior is nothing other than the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure."
"Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were exchanged in the long close embrace between the orphans, be sacred. A father, sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment. Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain."
"You see, when you're excited, your body has trouble telling the difference between pain and pleasure."
"Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience... It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter."
"It was too much. The comfortable people made comfortable jokes about weather and things but I sat mostly silent saying a word or so when necessary a word or so trying to hide from them the fact that I was a fool and feeling terrible And I was numb, numb again, numb again again and again, numbness and pain swelling in me."
"morning night and noon the traffic moves through and the murder and treachery of friends and lovers and all the people move through you. pain is the joy of knowing the unkindest truth that arrives without warning. life is being alone death is being alone. even the fools weep morning night and noon."
"Blood is drawn! I am impressed-though my hell-spawned powers will heal it! Besides... next to giving pain my favourite sport's to feel it."
"Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, the most poignant poems, the most gripping stories."
"I can't see my reflection in the waters, I can't speak the sounds that show no pain. I can't hear the echo of my footsteps, or can't remember the sound of my own name."
"It's annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren't they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain."
"Physical pain is my friend. I pursue it every night for four hours."
"But the others, those who tried to bring Jesus to life at the call of love, found it a cruel task to be honest. The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record."
"Pain was a fascinating horror"
"The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might learn as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being."
"I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it."
"I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you."
"The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves."
"The heavy armor becomes the light dress of childhood; the pain is brief, the joy unending."
"Then no rightful cause was left, and the pain of anger was turning into the shameful pain of submission. He had no right to condemn anyone - he thought - to denounce anything, to fight and die joyously, claiming the sanctity of virtue. The broken promises, the unconfessed desires, the betrayal, the deceit, the lies, the fraud - he was guilty of them all. What form of corruption could he scorn? Degrees do not matter, he thought; one does not bargain about inches of evil."
