c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
So it is with sorrow, each thinks his own present grief the most severe. For of this he judges by his own experience. He that is childless considers nothing so sad as to be without children; he that is poor, and has many children, complains of the extreme evils of a large family. He who has but one, looks upon this as the greatest misery, because that one, being set too much store by, and never corrected, becomes willful, and brings grief upon his father. He who has a beautiful wife, thinks nothing so bad as having a beautiful wife, because it is the occasion of jealousy and intrigue. He who has an ugly one, thinks nothing worse than having a plain wife, because it is constantly disagreeable. The private man thinks nothing more mean, more useless, than his mode of life. The soldier declares that nothing is more toilsome, more perilous, than warfare; that it would he better to live on bread and water than endure such hardships. He that is in power thinks there can be no greater burden than to attend to the necessities of others. He that is subject to that power, thinks nothing more servile than living at the beck of others. The married man considers nothing worse than a wife, and the cares of marriage. The unmarried declares there is nothing so wretched as being unmarried, and wanting the repose of a home. The merchant thinks the husbandman happy in his security. The husbandman thinks the merchant so in his wealth. In short, all mankind are somehow hard to please, and discontented and impatient.
— John Chrysostom
Reasonableness is a matter of degree. Beliefs can be very reasonable (Japan exists), fairly reasonable (quarks exist), not unreasonable (there's intelligent life on other planets) or downright unreasonable (fairies exist).There's a scale of reasonableness, if you like, with very reasonable beliefs near the top and deeply unreasonable ones towards the bottom. Notice a belief can be very high up the scale, yet still be open to some doubt. And even when a belief is low down, we can still acknowledge the remote possibility it might be true.How reasonable is the belief that God exists? Atheists typically think it very unreasonable. Very low on the scale. But most religious people say it is at least not unreasonable (have you ever met a Christian who said 'Hey, belief in God is no more reasonable than belief in fairies, but I believe it anyway!'?) They think their belief is at least halfway up the scale of reasonableness.Now, that their belief is downright unreasonable might, in fact, be established empirically. If it turned out that not only is there no good evidence of an all-powerful, all-good God, there's also overwhelming evidence against (from millions of years of unimaginable and pointless animal suffering, including several mass extinctions - to thousands of children being crushed to death or buried alive in Pakistan earthquake, etc. etc. etc.) then it could be empirically confirmed that there's no God.Would this constitute a 'proof' that there's no God? Depends what you mean by 'proof'. Personally I think these sorts of consideration do establish beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no all-powerful all-good God. So we can, in this sense, prove there's no God.Yet all the people quoted in my last blog say you cannot 'scientifically' prove or disprove God's existence. If they mean prove beyond any doubt they are right. But then hardly anything is provable in that sense, not even the non-existence of fairies.
— Stephen Law
[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova]In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
— Leon Trotsky
They" hate us because they feel--and "they" are not wrong--that it is within our power to do so much more, and that we practice a kind of passive-aggressive violence on the Third World. We do this by, for example, demonizing tobacco as poison here while promoting cigarettes in Asia; inflating produce prices by paying farmers not to grow food as millions go hungry worldwide; skimping on quality and then imposing tariffs on foreign products made better or cheaper than our own; padding corporate profits through Third World sweatshops; letting drug companies stand by as millions die of AIDS in Africa to keep prices up on lifesaving drugs; and on and on.  We do, upon reaching a very high comfort level, mostly choose to go from ten to eleven instead of helping another guy far away go from zero to
— Bill Maher, When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism
...she robbed me blind, the bitch!...and she's still at it! everyone who's ever done me wrong, robbed me, repudiated me, pillaged me has never suffered...and never will suffer! you could call it their reward!...robbing me brings you good luck!
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Normance
In a world like this with no laws, no charter of human rights, it's the women who suffer. It's the women who learn what it is to be tough, not the men.
— Alex Scarrow, Afterlight
Garfield's assassination attempt made "the whole nation care".
— Jefferson Davis
A kind of Providence keeps us blind to the intensity of suffering so as to keep us sane, until that day when the suffering is our own or that of someone we love beyond imagining.
— Jim Beaver, Life's That Way
It is a destiny of a woman to suffer in silence.
— Vikas Swarup, Q & A
So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course… but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Why the Romans, Father?" I asked him one afternoon. "Because, my child, they teach us how to bear suffering in a world of injustice where all faith is dead," he answered.
— Judith Merkle Riley, The Oracle Glass
We know—more from the faces immortalized on a handful of photographs than from the words of survivors—that the women and men who experienced that moment in Hiroshima believed they had encountered the beginning of the end of the world. There will never be enough future to prove them wrong.
— Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present
The great strength she had used in the old days to conquer and subdue, to win her will and to defend her way, seemed now a power but to protect the suffering and uphold the weak, and this she did, not alone in hovels but in the brilliant court and world of fashion, for there she found suffering and weakness also, all the more bitter and sorrowful since it dared not cry aloud.
— Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Lady Of Quality
Life is flinching in the midst of breathing, gasping at the thought of dying. It’s climbing ropeless up sheer rock faces, groping for the next finger-hole of hope. Steady on! Only a thousand feet to go and after that a jungle, a minefield, a rapids. (Can I stop smiling now?)Once, not long ago, I was flung off the cliff of the moment, thrust into an illicit relationship with destiny, an affair not of my making. Was I making love or being raped? The lines were fuzzy.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
Everything burned, everyone lied, and no one paid for it but the ones in the muck.
— Chris Galford, At Faith's End
Scholarship that is indifferent to human suffering is immoral.
— Richard Levins
We are oblivious to suffering. We are cheap with charity if it's not close to our home.
— Bill Maher, When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism
At the time, I remained relatively calm before that spectacle of horrors, which is perhaps the most telling indication of just how desensitized I had become. The more I witnessed such atrocities and rubbed shoulders with death, the more I desired to stay alive, no matter the cost.
— Kang Chol-Hwan, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
When a physical illness or other adverse circumstance arises, humans tend to add to the problem by worrying and increasing the mental anxiety in their situation. Let’s take illness as an example. We have to face the fact that life is not always perfect and that disease occasionally happens. When you fall into a painful situation or get sick, the best thing to do is to think about the greater anguish being suffered by so many of our fellow creatures. This is more productive than being concerned about one’s own suffering and compounding it with worry, giving too much attention to the pain
— Doug "Ten" Rose, Fearless Puppy on American Road
There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
I believed I was too sensitive and weak. To “prove” I wasn’t a victim anymore, I moved closer to painful experiences rather than away from them. Remaining in harm’s way and exposing myself to more pain kept me in the victim role rather than moving me out of it.
— Christina Enevoldsen
I fear you will never arrive at an understanding of God so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good that often comes as a result of pain. For there is nothing, from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering to the loftiest acme of pain, to which God does not respond. There is nothing in all the universe which does not in some way vibrate within the heart of God. No creature suffers alone; He suffers with His creatures and through it is in the process of bringing His sons and daughters through the cleansing and glorifying fires, without which the created cannot be made the very children of God, partakers of the divine nature and peace.
— George MacDonald, The Marquis' Secret
Every 'no' is a 'yes' to something.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Happy people know suffering more than anyone else, and that’s how they can see just how damn beautiful their lives are. It’s because they’ve seen the depths.
— Brianna Wiest
Suffering "buys" something, and this something possesses a certain value for all of us, for common consciousness; by suffering we buy the right to judge.
— Lev Shestov, In Job's Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths
If you do not want to stop the wheels of progress; if you do not want to go back to the Dark Ages; if you do not want to live again under tyranny, then you must guard your liberty, and you must not let the church get control of your government. If you do, you will lose the greatest legacy ever bequeathed to the human race—intellectual freedom.Now let me tell you another thing. If all the energy and wealth wasted upon religion—in all of its varied forms—had been spent to understand life and its problems, we would today be living under conditions that would seem almost like Utopia. Most of our social and domestic problems would have been solved, and equally as important, our understanding and relations with the other peoples of the world would have, by now, brought about universal peace.Man would have a better understanding of his motives and actions, and would have learned to curb his primitive instincts for revenge and retaliation. He would, by now, know that wars of hate, aggression, and aggrandizement are only productive of more hate and more human suffering.The enlightened and completely emancipated man from the fears of a God and the dogma of hate and revenge would make him a brother to his fellow man.He would devote his energies to discoveries and inventions, which theology previously condemned as a defiance of God, but which have proved so beneficial to him. He would no longer be a slave to a God and live in cringing fear!
— Joseph Lewis, An Atheist Manifesto
What you hate, you re-create; and what you bless, you put to rest.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
As an inmate of a concentration camp, Corrie Ten Boom heard a commotion, and saw a short distance away a prison guard mercilessly beating a female prisoner. “What can we do for these people?” Corrie whispered. “Show them that love is greater,” Betsie replied. In that moment, Corrie realized her sister’s focus was on the prison guard, not the victim she was watching. Betsie saw the world through a different lens. She considered the actions of greatest moral gravity to be the ones we originate, not the ones we suffer.
— Terryl L. Givens, The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life
Miracles can only inhabit the reality of our awareness when we surrender our need for the familiar to our desire for the limitless.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
The blessing of resistance lies in its power to illuminate those aspects of ourselves which have eluded our appreciation.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Suffering, then, is the badge of true discipleship. The disciple is not above his master. Following Christ means passio passiva, suffering because we have to suffer.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
Anesthesia was discovered. Do you know what it means to relieve man of his pain and suffering? Anesthesia is the most humane of all of man's accomplishments, and what a merciful accomplishment it was. For this great discovery we are indebted to Dr. W. T. G. Morton.Do you know that the religionists opposed the use of anesthesia on the ground that God sent pain as a punishment for sin, and it was considered the greatest of sacrileges to use it—just think of it, a sin to relieve man of his misery! What a monstrous perversion! This one instance alone should convince you of the difference in believing in God or not.No believer in God would have spent his energies to discover anesthesia. He would have been in mortal fear of the wrath of his God for interfering with his 'divine plan,' of making man suffer for having eaten of the fruit of the 'Tree of Knowledge.'The very crux of the matter is in this one instance. Man seeks to relieve his fellow man from the suffering of disease and the pangs of mental agony. The believers in God are content that man's suffering is ordained, and therefore he accepts life and its trials and tribulations as a penance for living.The fear of the wrath of God has been a stumbling block to progress.
— Joseph Lewis, An Atheist Manifesto
From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.
— John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.
— Pico Iyer
They suffer, of course... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The purpose of suffering is to contain the light of your desire until you see yourself in everything.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
To endure the cross is not a tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. When it comes, it is not an accident, but a necessity. It is not the sort of suffering which is inseparable from this mortal life, but the suffering which is an essential part of the specifically Christian life. It is not suffering per se but suffering-and-rejection, and not rejection for any cause or conviction of our own, but rejection for the sake of Christ.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
How I wish, how fervently I ache, to take my mother's hand, kiss her check,tell her I love her, and watch her smile. For me it was not, nor can ever be. But for you, reach out now. Reach out for your mother's hand-the hands of those you love. Say I love you.Don't wait.
— M.J. Burke Sr., Funeral in a Feminine Dress: Depravity Reborn as Virtue
Acceptance is the vessel of realization.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Hope is a fruit of proven character.
— John Eldredge, Love and War: Finding the Marriage You've Dreamed Of
Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heard why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope.What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
I'm hurting you to make you a better soldier in every way. To sharpen your wit. To intensify your effort. To keep you off balance, never sure what's going to happen next, so you always have to be ready for anything, ready to improvise, determined to win no matter what. I'm also making you miserable.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Resistance is the subtlest form of attachment.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
If God loves the world, might that not be proved in my own love for it? I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die. I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world. Just as a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another. To allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all. His love is suffering. It is our freedom and His sorrow. To love the world as much even as I could love it would be suffering also, for I would fail. And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.
— Aristotle, Politics
If the angels were capable of envy, they would envy us for two things: one is the receiving of Holy Communion, and the other is suffering.
— Maria Faustina Kowalska, Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy in My Soul
No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.
— Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher
Perhaps the only way to love is to bury yourself so deeply in it that you avoid its very suffering.
— Meghna Pant
I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn't heartless. She was only aware of things which I didn't learn till so many decades had passed. She knew secrets that only suffering can teach...
— Anne Rice, Merrick
Some day, we will know the value of suffering, but then we will no longer be able to suffer.
— Maria Faustina Kowalska
Bean was tired of talking about this. She looked so happy when she talked about God, but he hadn't figured it out yet, what God even was. It was like, she wanted to give God credit for every good thing, but when it was bad, then she either didn't mention God or had some reason why it was a good thing after all. As far as bean could see, though, the dead kids would rather have been alive, just with more food. If God loved them so much and he could do whatever he wanted, then why wasn't there more food for these kids? And if God just wanted them dead, why didn't he let them die sooner or not even be born at all, so they didn't have to go to so much trouble and get all excited about trying to be alive when he was just going to take them to his heart. None of it made any sense to Bean, and the more Sister Carlotta explained it, the less he understood it. Because if there was somebody in charge, then he ought to be fair, and if he wasn't fair, then why should Sister Carlotta be so happy that he was in charge?
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD.
— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
A plain, brown paper-wrapped package came in the mail recently. Upon opening it, I saw that it was a patchwork quilt about four feet by five feet. Many little scraps of cloth, carefully joined by loving hands. Two squares have suggestions of a black cassock and Roman white collar. The maker of the quilt states, “In its variety, I feel it denotes confusion and the world “mixed” up. There are dark spots for the dark times and bright squares, so, hopefully, some good and brightness will come in the future. The other pieces of cloth were of happy times, mothers and children, peaceful settings, happy things.” A note inside stated that she felt we were “scraps,”—the “scraps” that the abusive priests treated us like. They would use us as a scrap is used and then simply toss us aside. I was moved to tears. Holding it in my hands, I could almost feel others' pain and suffering, as I touched each panel. It is a magnificent work, worthy of a prize. I was deeply humbled by the receipt of the quilt. This woman got it; she really got it. This woman got it; she really got it. She has a deeper understanding of what we have gone through. It is rare.
— Charles L. Bailey Jr., In the Shadow of the Cross
Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfactions.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.
— John Ortberg, Faith and Doubt
Faith can be stirred within the walls of church buildings, but faith is formed and nourished in the waiting rooms of hospitals, helplessly witnessing a thirty-one-year-old sister suffer, holding kids affected by the AIDS epidemic, and being stretched outside of our own social makeup.
— Josh Ross, Scarred Faith: When Doubts Become Allies of Deep Faith
Quite honestly, there are days when I don’t need a God who will deliver me from the pit, just a God who will get down in a pit with me.
— Josh Ross, Scarred Faith: When Doubts Become Allies of Deep Faith
Suffering occurs when love's two hands pull your soul in two directions.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Sink, suffer, self-destruct Rise stronger, reconstruct
— Lamb of God
My sweetheart! When I think of you, it's as if I'm holding some healing balm to my sick soul, and although i suffer for you, i find that even suffering for you is easy.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk
Sometimes, it is true, a sense of isolation enfolds me like a cold mist as I sit alone and wait at life’s shut gate. Beyond there is light, and music, and sweet companionship; but I may not enter. Fate, silent, pitiless, bars the way…Silence sits immense upon my soul. Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, ‘there is joy is self-forgetfulness.’ So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others; ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.
— Helen Keller, The Open Door
Learn the discipline of being surprised not by suffering but by joy. As we grow old, there is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road. But don't be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen
Love is the reason why, even in suffering, we smile.
— David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness
Wisdom comes through suffering or old age. 
— Lesley Pearse, Georgia
The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.
— Tennessee Williams
(Talking about the movement to deny the prevalence and effects of adult sexual exploitation of children)So what does this movement consist of? Who are the movers and shakers? Well molesters are in it, of course. There are web pages telling them how to defend themselves against accusations, to retain confidence about their ‘loving and natural’ feelings for children, with advice on what lawyers to approach, how to complain, how to harass those helping their children. Then there’s the Men’s Movements, their web pages throbbing with excitement if they find ‘proof’ of conspiracy between feminists, divorcing wives and therapists to victimise men, fathers and husbands.Then there are journalists. A few have been vitally important in the US and Britain in establishing the fightback, using their power and influence to distort the work of child protection professionals and campaign against children’s testimony. Then there are other journalists who dance in and out of the debates waggling their columns behind them, rarely observing basic journalistic manners, but who use this debate to service something else – a crack at the welfare state, standards, feminism, ‘touchy, feely, post-Diana victimhood’. Then there is the academic voice, landing in the middle of court cases or inquiries, offering ‘rational authority’. Then there is the government. During the entire period of discovery and denial, not one Cabinet minister made a statement about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the harm it caused.Finally there are the ‘retractors’. For this movement to take off, it had to have ‘human interest’ victims – the accused – and then a happy ending – the ‘retractors’. We are aware that those ‘retractors’ whose parents trail them to newspapers, television studios and conferences are struggling. Lest we forget, they recanted under palpable pressure.
— Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People And Politics Behind The Campaign To Discredit Childhood Testimony
In the end when God does speak, it is not the pious friends who are commended. God tells then they have been guilty of misrepresenting God. Only Job – only angry, defiant, doubting Job has been faithful.The story of Job reminds us that God is not offended when we question. Indeed, if anything God is offended when we speak too glibly. Make room in your heart for the angry, defiant and doubting questions. You may find God there as well.
— Peggy Haymes, Strugglers, Stragglers and Seekers: daily devotions for the rest of us
Every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a divinity or an Idea which, if we turn to contemplate it, immediately gives us joy instead of the pain which we were feeling before — indeed the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer as a step enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form which they reflect and thus joyously to people our lives with divinities.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering the converse does. The brave who focus and all things good and all things beautiful to give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agent to bring the fullest night to all the world.
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Learning comes from books
—  penetration of a mystery from suffering.
The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how to raise awareness so that other people didn’t have to suffer the same, and how to understand, and then challenge, offenders who so love what they do to children that they can and must shut their minds to the feelings of children who have put their trust in them. P4
— Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People And Politics Behind The Campaign To Discredit Childhood Testimony
Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom?Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.
— Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People And Politics Behind The Campaign To Discredit Childhood Testimony
In this book we paint an unprecedented portrait of Britain’s first ‘false memory’ retraction and show that, like other ‘false memory’ cases which appeared in the public domain, memory itself was always a false trail – these women never forgot. We are not challenging people’s right to tell their own story and then to change it. But we do assert that the chance should be interpreted in the context that created it.Thousands of accounts of sexual and physical abuse in childhood cannot be explained by a pseudo-scientific ‘syndrome’. We have been shifted to the wrong debate, a debate about the malignancy of survivors and their allies, rather than those who have hurt them. That’s why the arguments have become so elusive. […]
— Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People And Politics Behind The Campaign To Discredit Childhood Testimony
[The sound of the wind] was just more proof that the workings of the world were random, that beauty, like suffering, was meaningless, that human life was as pointless as waves on sand.
— Anita Diamant, Day After Night
Fatigues and hardships serve to wean me more from the earth, and will make heaven sweeter.
— David Brainard
Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is the ultimate question of moral entitlement, and relevant only if right is relevant in this context, and it is not. A suicidal man cannot be concerned - and nor should he be - with questions of moral entitlement. (And how absurd.) His one concern should be whether self-execution will most expediently relieve his suffering.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
With memories of gravestones, of combing fingers through tangled hair, I wonder too ... If the rent in the canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, and our own emptiness, might actually become places to see.To see through to God.That which tears open our souls, those holes which splatter sight, they actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart aching beauty beyond. To him. To the god whom we endlessly crave.But how? How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing through to collect places? How do I give up resentment for gratitude, anger for spilling joy, so focus for God communion. To fully live to fully live grace enjoy with all that is beauty internal it is possible
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
God gave you life to live happily not to suffer heavily. I felt sufferment.
— Nadair Desmar
When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.
— Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
Because sometimes you have to suffer without the things you want now so you can have everything you need later.
— Cassia Leo, Pieces of You
It is not the outer objects that entangle us. It is the inner clinging that entangles us." - Tilopa
— Lama Surya Das, Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World
The world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish.
— R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before
I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I've had all the monstrosity I want.
— Saul Bellow, Herzog
You know, with talented people....They draw people to themselves, and without even trying to, they tear them to shreds.
— Kamoshida Hajime, さくら荘のペットな彼女 [Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo]
We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others.
— Elisabeth Elliot
Every man or woman who loves [God], they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He's apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy.
— Stephen King, The Stand
Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son. He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.
— Elisabeth Elliot
Nobody wants to be alone in misery. Cara experienced no shame in admitting that need. Not only did she not want to suffer alone, she demanded co-suffering from all who dared love her.
— Christa Parravani, Her
Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Though poor in this world's goods, though grieving the loss of loved ones, though suffering pain of body, though harassed by sin and Satan, though hated and persecuted by worldlings, whatever be the case and lot of the Christian, it is both his privilege and duty to rejoice in the Lord.
— Arthur W. Pink
When you suffer and lose, that does not mean you are being disobedient to God. In fact, it might mean you're right in the center of His will. The path of obedience is often marked by times of suffering and loss.
— Charles R. Swindoll
Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.
— George Saunders, Tenth of December
o endure the cross is not tragedy
—  it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.
I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and th rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.
— Saul Bellow, Herzog
Help me to get my eyes off my suffering and onto you, God.
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.
— Augustine of Hippo
We will never become the people of hope and blessing we're meant to be until we learn how to wake up and pay attention to the glory and pain, beauty and suffering that are in lives all around us.
— Richard Dahlstrom, The Colors of Hope: Becoming People of Mercy, Justice, and Love
Christ wrought out His perfect obedience as a man, through temptation, and by suffering.
— Alexander MacLaren
I had been so focused on why we were suffering through all these adversities that I had neglected to think about who could get me through them or how God was going to mold our hardships to be for his glory.
— Tracie Miles, Stressed-Less Living: Finding God's Peace in Your Chaotic World
What a mistake that had been, to create a construct [AI] that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish gods.
— David Marusek, Mind Over Ship
When we oppose oppression, we lift our hands from the collective reins that empower such oppression.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
It made no sense to him, this idea that some people got God and some people didn't.
— Kaya McLaren, How I Came to Sparkle Again
in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast...The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God...Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead---indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.
— Yōko Ogawa, Revenge
She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.
— Dean Koontz, Lightning
Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ's Cross at the center of that history? . . . But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and--to repeat once again--Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. he is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares man's lot and participates in his destiny.
— John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope
I love my mother.My mother loves my dad.Those two facts are undeniable.I want my father to live.I want him to fight to live as long as he can.My mother wants to let him pass.She does not want him suffering anymore.She says that I am not there in the middle of the night at home, when he begs her to let him die.I say that he should not be taking the medicine that the doctor is prescribing, that it made Mike Tyson want to eat his opponents young.
— JohnA Passaro, 6 Minutes Wrestling With Life
The acts of daily forbearance, the headache, or toothache, or heavy cold; the tiresome peculiarities of husband or wife, the broken glass...all of these sufferings, small as they are, if accepted lovingly, are most pleasing to God's Goodness.
— Francis de Sales
God does not remove us from all harm
—  He uses harm to move us close to Him.
No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument
—  it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil
Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly from one another, that everything flows and finds its level - but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it - I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself. And retribution not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that I see it myself. I have believed, and I want to see for myself, and if I am dead by that time, let them resurrect me, because it will be too unfair if it all takes place without me. Is it possible that I've suffered so that I, together with my evil deeds and sufferings, should be manure for someone's future harmony? I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion, and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.
— Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World
I alone knew what I had suffered. I alone knew what it felt like to be alive but dead.
— Phoolan Devi, The Bandit Queen of India: An Indian Woman's Amazing Journey from Peasant to International Legend
Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
He enables [his children] to walk before him
—  he holds their hand in difficulties
It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
— Oscar Wilde
What need is there to say more?The childish work for their own benefit,The Buddhas work for the benefit of others.Just look at the difference between them.If I do not exchange my happiness, for the suffering of others, I shall not attain the state of Buddhahood.And even in Samsara I shall have no real joy. The source of all misery in the world lies in thinking of oneself;The source of all happiness lies in thinking of others.
— Śāntideva
We may not understand why certain things occur in our lives, but we understand who to run to when they do.
— Dillon Burroughs, Hunger No More: A 1-Year Devotional Journey Through the Psalms
it’s not enough for Christians merely to recognize that the world isn’t what it ought to be and that people are suffering in ways they shouldn’t have to suffer.” Instead, our “sorrow and indignation” should prompt us to act in ways that “subvert” that brokenness.
— Ed Stetzer
Woman, the child of so many tears shall never perish.
— Ambrose of Milan
Murder rectifies nothing.
— Lybian proverb
... one fire burns out another’s burning.One pain is lessened by another’s anguish. -Romeo & Juliet
— William Shakespeare
Where two or more are gathered in the name of Man
—  that is civilization
Christ is sufficient. We do not need "support groups" for each and every separate tribulation. The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the same old rugged cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy.
— Elisabeth Elliot, These Strange Ashes
Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
...it was inevitable I loved you - we were soul mates - for the same reason, we were fated to suffer...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
When you observe that the fire in your room is getting dull, you do not always put on more coal, but simply stir with the poker; so God often uses the black poker of adversity in order that the flames of devotion may burn more brightly.
— Arthur W. Pink, An Exposition of Hebrews
The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Just because a person successfully steers a voyage through hell doesn't mean he ever wants to sail that route again.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
...everything I treasure is broken - it's of no use to anybody but me...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
We come to the end of suffering, through suffering.
— T. Scott McLeod, All That Is Unspoken
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
...love is suffering - that's the happy ending...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
it seemed to him that no matter what evils a man had committed, making him suffer purely for the sake of suffering was pointless. It didn't undo the harm he had wrought; it didn't please anyone or improve anyone's life.
— Kim Fielding, Brute
And you thought: they're used to it. But that was how those who suffered less always thought about those who suffered more, that they were used to it, that they no longer felt it as you did. Nobody ever got used to it. All they learned to do was to stop letting it show.
— James Meek, The People's Act of Love
...you go back to liberate the captives and sadly realize, some want to remain tied down in the cave...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
This was too much for him to handle. It was like watching memories of his life play out from a different camera angle, sometimes with new scenes added. He was living DVD extras.
— Dennis Sharpe, Destroyer of Worlds
...the real absurdity is that to love is to suffer, but the reverse isn't always true...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain