"The truth is like a scalpel. The truth is painful."
Painful quotes
Painful
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Painful quotes (page 3 of 18)
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"Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors."
"Growth is often a painful process."
"I am interested in the unknown, and the only path to the unknown is through breaking barriers, an often painful process."
"If I hadn't gone through some of the painful experiences in my life, I would not be me."
"Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant."
"If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love."
"There is nothing more painful than being rejected simply for being who you are."
"It is painful to doubt the sincerity of those we love."
"Divorce is hard and painful and complicated, and something you have to grow through."
"Fear is bound to disappear when you realize that failure is not something shameful, damaging, destructive, or painful, but something natural."
"Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage."
"My joy is as painful as my pain."
"Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."
"The longer they were together the more doubtful seemed the nature of his regard, and sometimes for a few painful minutes she believed it to be no more than friendship"
"What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive."
"Great abilities, when employed as God directs, do but make the owners of them greater and more painful servants to their neighbors."
"Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought."
"Rather I fear on the contrary that while we banish painful thoughts we may banish memory as well."
"Identify your painful thought, question it, and wake yourself up. No one else can."