Suffering quotes
4.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside suffering — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"We simply prefer to deny death or tragedy at all costs and, with it, a fundamental aspect of life. We do this instead of acknowledging that suffering represents one of the strongest incentives of life, which is the base of human solidarity and what brings intensity to happiness."
"If I'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill. It niggles when things get out of my control."
"I only know that when Jesus is with a person, that one can endure the deepest suffering and somehow emerge a better and stronger Christian because of it."
"Great and small suffer the same mishaps."
"We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold; qualities that are in excess are so much at variance with our feelings that they are impalpable: we do not feel them, though we suffer from their effects."
"There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It's hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger."
"If yuh don't know God yuh goin' suffer and dead! No God Noh Partial, regardless weh yuh deh pon earth."
"If you argue against reality you will suffer."
"An unquestioned mind is the world of suffering."
"A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it."
"There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example."
"Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens of the world who will suffer the most from our excesses."
"The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations."
"Of what worth are convictions that bring not suffering?"
"Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself."
"Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth."
"What breaks my heart is suffering of any kind. Too often, our world is divisive and cruel where it needs to be uniting and loving."
"Will you tell Him frankly, that you cannot carry your load, and that you need help? Will you suffer Him to help you in His own way, and be glad and thankful if He will only take you under His care, and direct the whole course of your life for you?"
"I pass over the toil and suffering and danger which attended the redemption and cultivation of their lands by the colonists, and turn to their civil condition and to the conduct and history of the government."
"A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever."
