Suffering - Quotes

Affliction is a spiritual physic for the soul, and is compared to a furnace, for as gold is tried and purified therein, so men are proved and either purified from their dross, and fitted for good uses, or else entirely burnt up and undone forever. - Wellins Calcott

All suffering contorts the countenance so woefully that the pain flies to the beholder likewise. - James Vila Blake

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. - George Eliot

I marvel now that it was not obvious how inextricable suffering and fear are. It was not until fear left that I noticed, slowly, how it seemed to have taken suffering with it. It took a while to figure out that (for me, anyhow) suffering is mostly caused by fear – not by the circumstances themselves, but by my response to them. - Jan Frazier

In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal. - Stefan Zweig

It is an easy thing for one whose foot is on the outside of calamity to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer. - Aeschylus

It requires more courage to suffer than to die. - Napoleon Bonaparte

Learn to bear suffering, and it shall bear thee. - Ivan Panin

Nothing brings suffering as does the untamed, uncontrolled unattended and unrestrained heart. That heart brings suffering. - Gautama Buddha

Patience, piety, and salutary knowledge spring up and ripen under the harrow of affliction; before there is wine or oil, the grape must be trodden and the oil pressed. - Walter Savage Landor

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape. - Charles Dickens

Suffering well borne is better than suffering removed. - Henry Ward Beecher

The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food – it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on. - George Eliot

There is nothing like suffering to enlighten the giddy brain, widen the narrow mind, improve the trivial heart. - Charles Reade

Those who have suffered, who have known poverty or oppression, are generally the most prone to kindness. Perhaps it is well to endure some misery if only to learn this lesson. - Arthur Lynch

To be most fertile, the soil must first be torn up; and shall not thy soul accept suffering for the sake of better growth? - Ivan Panin

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. - C. S. Lewis

We need to be aware of the suffering, but retain our clarity, calmness and strength so we can help transform the situation. - Thich Nhat Hanh

When someone does not know how to handle his own suffering, he allows it to spill all over the people around him. When you suffer, you make people around you suffer. That's very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won't spread it everywhere. - Thich Nhat Hanh