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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"Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future."
"Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content."
"If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example."
"May all that have life be delivered from suffering."
"Suffering arises from trying to control what is uncontrollable, or from neglecting what is within our power."
"The deep meaning of the cross of Christ is that there is no suffering on earth that is not borne by God."
"For some people there is no comfort without pain. Thus; we define salvation through suffering. Hence, why we choose people who we know aren't right for ourselves."
"Blame neither man, nor God, nor anyone in the world. When you find yourselves suffering, blame yourselves, and try to do better."
"We can experience joy in adverse circumstances by holding God's benefits in such esteem that the recognition of them and meditation upon them shall overcome all sorrow."
"The entire universe is God's cosmic motion picture, and that individuals are merely actors in the divine play who change roles through reincarnation; mankind's deep suffering is rooted in identifying too closely with one's current role, rather than with the movie's director, or God."
"It is not God's fault. It is our fault that we suffer. Whatever we sow we reap."
"To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak."
"We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering."
"The worst lesson that can be taught to a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings"
"Pain is certain, suffering is optional."
"To trap one's self-suffering is to risk being devoured from the inside."
"The ego says, ‘I shouldn’t have to suffer,’ and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it."
"After having been lost in the world, suddenly, through the pressure of suffering, the realization comes that the answers may not be found out there in worldly attainment and in the future. That's an important point for many people to reach. That sense of deep crisis-when the world as they have known it, and the sense of self that they have known that is identified with the world, become meaningless."
"Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence."
"If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home."
