Life is Suffering

Life is suffering. To live, to be alive is suffering. You have to understand, and accept that suffering is a part of life.

We can’t avoid suffering, but we can lessen our suffering by understanding why we are suffering. When there is understanding and when there is acceptance, there is less suffering. The more you understand, the lesser you suffer. Sometimes, all we need to do to avoid suffering is to let go, and accept what comes.

We suffer from the fear and uncertainty of the unknown. What we do not know or understand, we imagine the worst and hence, we fear. We have a hard time letting go of this fear and so we continue to suffer again and again. The answer to that, then, would be to look at what is making you suffer. Once you find the cause, you can take preventive measures. And if there is nothing you can do about it, you just have to face up to what’s coming your way. That is Life.

Stop clinging to things, to people. Clinging is suffering. Let go, and accept.

People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don’t suffer any more. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life. - Nisargadatta Maharaj

The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears. - Michel de Montaigne

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality. - Seneca

We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for. - Thich Nhat Hanh

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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

Suffering - Quotes

Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches him this. - Simone Weil

All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. - Isaac Asimov

As in labour, the more one doth exercise, the more one is enabled to do, strength growing upon work; so with the use of suffering, men's minds get the habit of suffering, and all fears and terrors are not to them but as a summons to battle, whereof they know beforehand they shall come off victorious. - Sir Philip Sidney

It is not permanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent, when they are not. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Many people suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don’t suffer any more. Mindfulness helps you come home to the present. Life is available only in the present. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Our suffering comes from our attachment to people and things, our repeated attempts to find something lasting where there is nothing lasting to be found. - Philip Martin

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. - Ben Okri

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. - John Green

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life. - Angelina Jolie

If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion. - Eckhart Tolle

Is Suffering Really Necessary?

Is suffering really necessary? Yes and no. If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being – no humility, no compassion. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary. - Eckhart Tolle

A man went to a Zen master and asked him how he can be free of suffering. The Zen master answered: Accept pleasure and accept pain. To be free of pain the pain has to be accepted; and it is inevitable and natural, pain is pain, a simple painful fact.

Suffering however, is and always is the refusal of accepting pain, the claim that life should not be painful, it is the rejection of a fact, denial of life and the nature of things. - Source Unknown

Suffering - Quotes

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary. - Seneca

From what is dear to us, suffering arises. - Unknown

If you cling you will suffer. If you let go of that clinging, that suffering disappears. In dependence on clinging, a certain kind of suffering arises. When that dependent condition for suffering goes away, that suffering goes away as well. - Gil Fronsdal

Most of your suffering comes from the lack of understanding of yourself and others. - Thich Nhat Hanh

No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our character, purifies our heart, expands our soul, and makes us more tender and charitable. - Orson Whitney 

Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved. - Helen Keller

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls. - Edwin Hubble Chapin 

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar. - Thich Nhat Hanh

People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don’t suffer anymore. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind. - Aristotle

Suffering follows the evil act as the wheel of the cart follows the foot of the ox that draws it. - Unknown

Suffering is a disease and can therefore be cured completely. - The Buddha

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life. - Horatius

Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life. - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It's a great enhancer. It might last a minute, or a month, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a greater space. For happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believe that I grew, and further defined my capacities--not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience. - Lance Armstrong

The Buddha called suffering a holy truth, because our suffering has the capacity of showing us the path to liberation. Embrace your suffering and let it reveal to you the way to peace. - Unknown

The cosmos is indifferent to human suffering, and, it is sheer folly to expect security or eternal happiness while one sojourns in a cosmos subject to constant change. All along it is suffering. Therefore, detachment is the only way to put an end to suffering. -  K. Sri Dhammananda

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. - Eckhart Tolle

The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears. - Michel Montaigne

The reward of suffering is experience. - Aeschylus

The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don't wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy. - Thich Nhat Hanh

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. - Thomas Merton

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality. - Seneca

We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for. - Thich Nhat Hanh

We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others. - William Somerset Maugham

We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment. - Jim Rohn

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending. - Thich Nhat Hanh

When you learn how to suffer, you suffer much less.-  Thich Nhat Hanh

Suffering

When Lord Buddha spoke about suffering, he wasn't referring simply to superficial problems like illness and injury, but to the fact that the dissatisfied nature of the mind itself is suffering. No matter how much of something you get, it never satisfies your desire for better or more. This unceasing desire is suffering; its nature is emotional frustration. 

Suffering is the basic lot of mankind. The only way to end suffering is by purifying the mind. The individual creates his own suffering and it is he alone who can end it.

It is not the eye, nor the ear, which hold us bound to the wheel of suffering, nor is it the things perceived by the eye, or the ear. It is the desire of the one for the other that is the fetter. If the eye and the ear are not attached to things seen and heard, then there is no sorrow or suffering.

Suffering arises from desiring, wanting and craving. One escape from the burden of suffering when one is liberated from your self and its desires.

Suffering follows the evil act as the wheel of the cart follows the foot of the ox that draws it.

Source Unknown 

Why Is There So Much Suffering In The World?

There is so much suffering because there is so much sentience, or experience. We are sentient beings. We feel as well as think. We experience life on many levels. Because of that, we can live deeply. But because of that, we can suffer tremendously.

The smarter you are, the more you can suffer. Until you really wise up. Then you can put things into a bigger perspective and endure what before would have been unendurable.

But again, why is there so much suffering? Our freedom is so powerful, we can create enormous suffering for each other. And we do. That explains part of it. Some of that is intentional evil. Some is just stupidity. But even apart from malice and thoughtlessness, suffering enters our lives.

We can’t always say why. We can’t always understand the suffering that we see around us. And this frustrates us. But we can respond to it better than we typically do. And here is a fascinating fact about human life that I’ve noticed. The people who respond to suffering the best seem puzzled and frustrated by it the least. And this itself is something well worth philosophising about.

- Tom Morris