Pain quotes

Pain

8.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

8.2K quotes

Explore further

Browse quotes that often appear alongside pain — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

Quote collection

Pain quotes (page 96 of 410)

Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.

Pema Chodron Buddhist Teacher, Author
Pain

"If it's painful, you become willing not just to endure it but also to let it awaken your heart and soften you. You learn to embrace it."

Read quote 3 likes
Pema Chodron Buddhist Teacher, Author
Pain

"Buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try to get ground under our feet. For instance, if what we're feeling is rage, we usually assume that there are only two ways to relate to it. One is to blame others. Lay it all on somebody else; drive all blames into everyone else. The other alternative is to feel guilty about our rage and blame ourselves."

Read quote 3 likes
Pema Chodron Buddhist Teacher, Author
Pain

"The Buddha taught that flexibility and openness bring strength and that running from groundlessness weakens us and brings pain. But do we understand that becoming familiar with the running away is the key? Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well"

Read quote 3 likes
Pema Chodron Buddhist Teacher, Author
Pain

"One very powerful and effective way to work with this tendency to push away pain and hold on to pleasure is the practice of tonglen.  In tonglen practice, when we see or feel suffering, we  breathe in with the notion of completely feeling it, accepting it, and owning it."

Read quote 3 likes

"Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain."

Read quote 3 likes

"This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the Benignant Principle, untrammelled and uncontrolled, visits in the fulness of its power the universal frame of things."

Read quote 3 likes

"Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself."

Read quote 3 likes
Peter Dickens Author
Pain

"Green consumerism generally, and 'healthy' products and lifestyles in particular, contain quite precise notions about how an individual should consider his or her well-being. Not only is the market-place celebrated but an understanding of the 'natural body' itself becomes fetishised and idolised. Normality seems to have wholly dispensed with bodily illness and pain. Perfection is the norm, and one that can be gained through acquiring the correct products and perfecting the body."

Read quote 3 likes
Philip Roth Novelist
Pain

"The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate."

Read quote 3 likes
Plutarch Philosopher, Historian
Pain

"Being conscious of having done a wicked action leaves stings of remorse behind it, which, like an ulcer in the flesh, makes the mind smart with perpetual wounds; for reason, which chases away all other pains, creates repentance, shames the soul with confusion, and punishes it with torment."

Read quote 3 likes
Prince Fielder Baseball Player
Pain

"Obviously I wasn't playing well at the time. But as a player, you lie to yourself. You say, "There's nothing wrong. I'm just not on time [at the plate]." You make something else up because pain is not an option."

Read quote 3 likes
Petrarch Poet, Scholar
Pain

"Alack our life, so beautiful to see, With how much ease life losest, in a day, What many years with pain and toil amassed!"

Read quote 3 likes
Paul Simon Musician, Songwriter
Pain

"We're living in a certain time, and we're aware of it. And that's part of what we're aware of, along with our own personal aches and pains."

Read quote 3 likes
Ed Martin American Football Player
Pain

"Pain creates movement, and movement controls balance. If the opponent does not feel any pain you may be forced to break bones."

Read quote 3 likes

"Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration."

Read quote 3 likes