c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.
— Raymond Carver
We had our thing. It is a really good memory but now we're older. Things change.
— Abbi Glines, Ceaseless
There is no past. Past is present when you carry it with you.
— Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
Mr. Rawlings is a man of his word. The problem was, he made two different promises and he felt honored to keep them both. He hoped that by fulfilling one, in a different than expected way, he may have the chance to rectify the other.
— Aleatha Romig, Truth
Widge can see the past." Poppet says suddenly. "That's why his stories are so good." "The past is easier," Widget says. "It's already there.""In the stars?" Bailey asks."No." Widget says. "On people. The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it's still there, the events and t hings that pushed you to where you are now.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
The past gives you no justice. Sentences are passed. But that doesn't mean you get justice. You can stand there forever and rail and say, 'Someone has to pay. I want what was taken from me.' But you're just going to get silence coming back at you. The past doesn't pay. We pay. And we're all free to decide when we've had enough.
— Michael Hainey, After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story
It had been years since she question his fidelity, but he'd stepped on to the old fame track again, and that was where the road had taken them before. Infidelity could be forgiven, but forgetting it was impossible. Strangely, that wasn't what bothered her the most. What bothered her was that she didn't really care.
— Kristin Hannah, Distant Shores
The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.
— Penelope Lively, How It All Began
Cut away the nonsense, the drama, the regret, the scars of the past, and make a decision to no longer let them govern your happiness and freedom.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Night falls fast. Today is in the past.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
It was as if she would never be whole until the secrets of the past were exposed.
— Rachel Abbott, The Back Road
This is your life. This is your moment. Think of all you have been through just to get here… MAKE IT COUNT!
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
At least if you were ignorant, you could do what you wanted, you had no idea what had been achieved in the past. You were free, instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid.
— Hamza wolf
we can gain experience from the past, but we cant relive it. But we can hope for the future, Its always along side us, on the inside of us looking out. The past should not be allowed to evaporate but should exist only in memories.
— Sean Sullivan
Sometimes, at the least opportune times, the past is an insomniac, alive and well.
— Courtney Cole, If You Stay
Our past may shape us, but it doesn't define us.
— Alyson Noel, Night Star
The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.
— George Orwell, Coming Up for Air
My past has shaped me, that's true of anyone.
— R.K. Lilley, In Flight
I couldn’t help but feel as if everyone had lied about everything. We all had secrets. We all had a dark side to our innocent cover. I wondered what we would be like, if we had been completely honest with each other in the first place. Maybe more people would be alive, but then again, more people could be dead.
— Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow
There comes a moment in life when one must acknowledge that you just can't keep looking back into your past for reasons to keep someone in your present and future. Regardless of how much looking that cruel reality in the eye hurts...memories can't be enough.
— Eiry Nieves
Only fools prefer the past!
— Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
— Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
It has been said, people drawn to law enforcement have a sixth sense, an ability to see what others do not. He prayed he was wrong. His sixth sense said there was much more than a broken heart in Claire's past.
— Aleatha Romig, Truth
You can never forget the past unless you face up to it.
— Fan Wu, February Flowers
The past is not a place I like to visit. This project is forcing me to go there, to tidy up my thoughts. I'm not normally a navel-gazer. I've always thought you find yourself in other people. I'm visiting here. I don't want to set up house.
— Bono, Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas
Tension is the Mirror of our Past.
— Saab
To celebrate the Fourth of July meant something definite in those days.
— Carol Ryrie Brink, Caddie Woodlawn's Family
The past will be your teacher if you learn from it
—  your master if you live in it.
Who knows what's for true once a time is past? There's no way to prove how something was that's gone. And if a time is gone, what does it matter? It's all rain into rivers now.
— Jo Dereske, Glom Gloom
Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.
— Marianne Williamson, The Law of Divine Compensation: Mastering the Metaphysics of Abundance
When I look back on the stuff I used to wear, I wonder why somebody didn't try to stop me. Just a friendly warning, "You may regret this," would have been fine.
— Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is...
...the wounds of the past and the scars of the present don't disfigure me in your eyes - because you know the price I pay for loving you ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.
— Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
The Past is Experience, Thats All You Got to Learn From.
— Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield
He noticed that she threw away the crumbled bus ticket on the street as soon as she got down. He picked it up and put it in his pocket along with his own a memorabilia of their first date together, just like a strand of her hair he would find later on his shirt and the broken pen cap that she would go on to search in the laboratory and so many other such small things which he would collect.
— Faraaz Kazi, Truly, Madly, Deeply
I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.
— Eva Rice, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
He took the last seat, as usual, a subtle reminder of what he was and what he had become.
— Faraaz Kazi, Truly, Madly, Deeply
Stay More' is synonymous with 'Status Quo' in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present.
— Donald Harington, The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks
...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
A woman without a past is like a fruitcake without brandy—insipid!
— Nancy Atherton
Our past is the forge upon which we are hardened and tempered, to prepare us for the present. We are like a fine blade that must be hammered into shape before it can be ready to make its finest cuts.
— Larry Atchley Jr.
Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.
— Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven
How can anyone truthfully claim to love someone when they’re not prepared to share everything with that person, including their past?
— Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats
The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.
— Laura     Miller, Butterfly Weeds
She always used to say that the past is a relentless parasite in its quest, feeding off of the senses, looking for anything that will trigger a memory–forever there to complicate the present, forever there to remind us that it will always be a piece of us. I never had a clue as to what she meant, until now.
— Laura     Miller, Butterfly Weeds
You can't just wipe away your history.
— T.J. Klune, Bear, Otter, and the Kid
But thing in the past are like plate that’s shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Big events, small, mundane moments of the day–it doesn’t matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.
— Laura     Miller, Butterfly Weeds
In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
I am slowly learning to pluck the flowers of my past from the weeds, and place them in the window where I can see them first. ~Call Me Tuesday
— Leigh Byrne
We always cherish and miss the time passed yet struglling for a better future but after moving to next level we feel the past was beautiful
— Salman Ahmad
How many stars can you count in the sky? How many mistakes can you count in your life? Stop counting! No clever man ever is stuck in the past!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.
— V.T. Davy, Black Art
He walks through the house of his past, hoping he'll find the right door, hoping he'll find the key.
— Steven Herrick
We all have a past that may be worthy of some criticism".~R. Alan Woods [2012]
— R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is The Destination: A Photo Journal
I missed my mother and Elysius. It wasn't that I wanted them with me at that very moment. I wanted them in the past. I wanted to have back just one sunny afternoon together.
— Bridget Asher, The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted
Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an accordion; but they can also be stacked inside one another like Russian dolls, where the walls around time periods are extremely close to one another. The people of other centuries hear our phonographs blaring, and through the walls of time we see them raising their hands towards the deliciously prepared meal.
— Elisabeth Lenk
Never forget the pastTo lead the future best
— Senthil babu
The past is important for all the information and wisdom it holds. But you can get lost in it. You've got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present.
— Lauren Kate, Rapture
There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.
— Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
Learn from your past and shut the door behind to live in present.Our past is just like a dry rose which was once a rose with all colors of life, with sweet fragrance, with soft petal, with thorns but now it is left with only thorns which could still hurt.
— ideaswar
Our past may shape us, but it doesn't define who we become.
— Ellen Hopkins
History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.
— Heather Anastasiu, Glitch
People like him, who buried their past so determinedly, should not help it from the grave so easily.
— Steve Berry, The Charlemagne Pursuit
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.
— Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls
—  the most massive characters are seared with scars.
I knew you'd kiss me.""How?" I say. Because I didn't know myself. "Because I am in pain," He say's. "That's the only way I get your attention.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
— Albert Camus, The Fall
The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.
— Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
— Marcel Proust
I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.
— Albert Schweitzer
There are far too many silent sufferers.  Not because they don't yearn to reach out, but because they've tried and found no one who cares.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
As long as you think that the cause of your problem is “out there”—as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering—the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you’re suffering in paradise.
— Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
How can one be well...when one suffers morally?
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, “What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage; the certainty that you wasted your life.
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Power
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
— Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods
We do not suffer by accident.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip
Life is but a Weaving” (the Tapestry Poem)“My life is but a weavingBetween my God and me.I cannot choose the colorsHe weaveth steadily.Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;And I in foolish prideForget He sees the upperAnd I the underside.Not ’til the loom is silentAnd the shuttles cease to flyWill God unroll the canvasAnd reveal the reason why.The dark threads are as needfulIn the weaver’s skillful handAs the threads of gold and silverIn the pattern He has plannedHe knows, He loves, He cares;Nothing this truth can dim.He gives the very best to thoseWho leave the choice to Him.
— Corrie ten Boom
God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives. Felt weakness deepens dependence on Christ for strength each day. The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away. To live with your ‘thorn’ uncomplainingly — that is, sweet, patient, and free in heart to love and help others, even though every day you feel weak — is true sanctification. It is true healing for the spirit. It is a supreme victory of grace.
— J.I. Packer
Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our souls, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.
— Neal Shusterman, UnWholly
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
— Oscar Wilde
The point is, Ilsa Hermann had decided to make suffering her triumph. When it refused to let go of her, she succumbed to it. She embraced it. 
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
— William Nicholson, Shadowlands
Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.
— Anna Funder, All That I Am
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
As long as one suffers one lives.
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
And St. Francis said: 'My dear son, be patient, because the weaknesses of the body are given to us in this world by God for the salvation of the soul. So they are of great merit when they are borne patiently.
— Francis of Assisi, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi
No matter how much you hate or how much you suffer, you can't bring the dead back to life
— Nobuhiro Watsuki
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Suffering in the path of Christian obedience, with joy - because the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life (Psalm 63:3) - is the clearest display of the worth of God in our lives. Therefore, faith-filled suffering is essential in this world for the most intense, authentic worship. When we are most satisfied with God in suffering, he will be most glorified in us in worship. Our problem is not styles of music. Our problem is styles of life. When we embrace more affliction for the worth of Christ, there will be more fruit in the worship of Christ.
— John Piper, Tested by Fire: The Fruit of Suffering in the Lives of John Bunyan, William Cowper and David Brainerd.
Attitude Is EverythingWe live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations.The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances?When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.
— Sandra Lee Dennis
Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?
— Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions
If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.
— Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Who taught you all this, doctor?"The reply came promptly:"Suffering.
— Albert Camus
Suffering is nothing by itself. But suffering shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift, the most beautiful gift, a token of love.
— Mother Teresa, In the Heart of the World: Thoughts, Stories and Prayers
If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.
— Khaled Hosseini
We who are like senseless children shrink from suffering, but love its causes. We hurt ourselves; our pain is self-inflicted! Why should others be the object of our anger?
— Śāntideva
I suffer because my interactions with others do not meet the expectations I did not know I had.
— James Patrick McDonald
As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.
— Jack London, The Star Rover
I want to suffer so that I may love.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
— This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.—	Who knows it better?—	Yet you believe?	Kumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. There is my wife, and you, my friend, and these people who welcomed me, and the child who is so eager to be with us here in Ndotsheni – so in my suffering I can believe.— I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.Kumalo looked at his friend with joy. You are a preacher, he said.
— Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.
— bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.
— Pema Chödrön, Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change
Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Whether it's a Christian or a non-Christian, there's nothing like suffering to show us how small, needy, and not in control we are. Suffering has a way of sobering us up to the realization that we can't make it on our own, that we need help, that we're broken.
— Tullian Tchividjian
Injustice in the end produces independence.
— Voltaire
In suffering we find our truest selves.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
It is easy to tell the toiler How best he can carry his packBut no one can rate a burden's weightUntil it has been on his back
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Goodbye, Room." I wave up at Skylight. "Say goodbye," I tell Ma. "Goodbye, Room."Ma says it but on mute.I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.
— Emma Donoghue, Room
People think I'm crazy to put myself through such torture, though I would argue otherwise. Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness. Dostoyevsky had it right: 'Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.' Never are my senses more engaged than when the pain sets in. There is a magic in misery. Just ask any runner.
— Dean Karnazes, Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner
Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.
— Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say to himself with a hint of regret at his hitherto lack of indifference, 'All a dim illusion, was it? Surely it was foolish of me to think any of this had meaning.' He would then spend hours staring at the sky, wondering how best to pass the time if everything—even the sky itself— were for naught. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no best way to pass the time. The only way to deal with the illusion of time was to endure it, knowing full well, all the while, that one was truly enduring nothing at all. Unfortunately for him, this nihilistic resolution to dispassion didn’t suit him very well and he soon became extremely bored. Faced now with the choice between further boredom and further suffering, he impatiently chose the latter, sailing another few weeks along the coast , and then inland, before finally dropping anchor off the shores of the fishing village of Yami.
— Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable
The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.
— Mary Balogh, First Comes Marriage
For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream. He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror.
— Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne
Nothing eases suffering like human touch.
— Bobby Fischer, Chess Meets of the Century
Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.
— Michael Hureaux-Perez
Those who don't know how to suffer are the worst off. There are times when the only correct thing we can do is to bear out troubles until a better day.
— Ming-Dao Deng, Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony
No one is ever holy without suffering.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.
— Léon Bloy
To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.
— André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor
I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman.
— Charlotte Brontë, Villette
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, real hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.
— Hermann Hesse
Why d’you make me suffer?"“Because I love you.”Now it was his turn to get angry. “No, no, you don’t love me! People in love want happiness, not pain!”“People in love want only love, even at the cost of pain.”“Then you’re making people suffer on purpose.”“Yes, to see if you love me.”The Baron’s philosophy would not go any further. “Pain is a negative state of the soul.” “Love is all.” “Pain should always be fought against.”“Love refuses nothing.”“Some things I’ll never admit.”“Oh yes, you do, now, for you love me and you suffer.
— Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
He had suffered, and he had learnt to think, two advantages that he had never known before…
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Because all my life I've learned to suffer in silence - Athena
— Paulo Coelho, The Witch Of Portobello
I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I’m doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situations that occur. And if you just say ‘ok, here I am, I’m going to experience the pain,’ you don’t suffer. The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering.
— Hubert Selby Jr.
Accept the long night patiently, quietly, humbly, and resignedly as intended for your true good. It is not a punishment for sin committed but an instrument of annihilating egoism.
— Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton
Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are," replied the girl steadily, "give away your hearts, love will carry you all lengths--even such as you, who have home, friends, other admireres, everything to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgment, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering.
— Charles Dickens
Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
— Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria...
— Elie Wiesel, Night
The secrets of alchemy exist to transform mortals from a state of suffering and ignorance to a state of enlightenment and bliss.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way
— Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of the insulted and injured, oppressed by destiny, and smarting under the sense of its injustice.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Insulted and Humiliated
It is easy to suffer for a cause or for a mission; this ennobles the heart of the person suffering. But how to explain suffering because of a man? It's not explainable. With that kind of suffering, a person feels as if they're in hell, because there is no nobility, no greatness - only misery.
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering.
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Suffering — how divine it is, how misunderstood! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.
— Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus
Let me have a faithful account of all that concerns you; I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sufferings less, for it is said that all sorrows divided are made lighter.
— Héloïse d'Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
Demon or not, it didn't matter, suffering was everywhere he looked.
— Brom, The Child Thief
At last she sighed."But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The White Witch
Ethically, she couldn't cause the suffering of any living thing. Logically, bacon cheeseburgers were delicious.
— Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows
It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.
— Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned
That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may 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.
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
...stories that rise from deep suffering can provide the most potent remedies for past, present, and even future ills.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Gift of Story: A Wise Tale About What is Enough
Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally 'feeling with.' Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort--a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance.
— Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism: The Belief System That Enables Us to Eat Some Animals and Not Others
Suffering is the greatest treasure on earth; it purifies the soul. In suffering, we learn who our true friend is.
— Maria Faustina Kowalska, Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy in My Soul
We rise up And we fall downOnly to rise again
— Karen Hackel, The Whisper of Your Soul
The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. 'Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.'This perked me up a little. I said I had been looking at the stones in these walls for months. There wasn't anything or anyone in the world I knew better. Maybe at one time, way back, I had searched for a face in them. But the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire—and it belonged to Marie.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
It would then be brought abruptly to an end, for the brightness had shown suffering the way.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Suffering ceases to be suffering when we form a clear picture of it.
— Richard Paul Evans, Miles to Go
The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.
— Melvin Jules Bukiet
If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World
We put ourselves through hell and that is hell.
— Marty Rubin
In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul -- in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...
— Emil M. Cioran
Love hurts because we think that's what love is.
— Marty Rubin
The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.
— Samuel R. Delany, Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .
— Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay
I could not answer the ceaseless inward question-why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of-I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
If something came out of the deal, it couldn’t make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The struggle of today, is not altogether for today - it is for a vast future also.
— Abraham Lincoln
That the other suffers has to be learned
—  and it can never be learned fully.
Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Suffering so someone else didn't have to suffer. Sacrificing your body for someone else's well being.
— Jodi Picoult, Picture Perfect
These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering beside one another and through one another; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling all the while.
— Victor Hugo
At the root of all misery is unfulfilled desire.
— Scott Hahn, Hope for Hard Times
He saw mankind going through life in a childlike manner... which he loved but also despised.... He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to be entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured....
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Long you must suffer, knowing not what,until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering's taste comes forth in you.Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
I understood that I was suffering because I couldn't make anyone else around me feel better.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Many will argue that there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat. Consider this. Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one's own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people's lives above one's own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, ummah, or church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell. Whether combat is the dark side of the same version, or only something equivalent in intensity, I simply don't know. I do know that at the age of fifteen I had a mystical experience that scared the hell out of me and both it and combat put me into a different relationship with ordinary life and eternity.Most of us, including me, would prefer to think of a sacred space as some light-filled wonderous place where we can feel good and find a way to shore up our psyches against death. We don't want to think that something as ugly and brutal as combat could be involved in any way with the spiritual. However, would any practicing Christian say that Calvary Hill was not a sacred space?
— Karl Marlantes, What It is Like to Go to War
It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
Perhaps," you will add, grinning, "those who have never been slapped will also not understand" - thereby politely hinting that I, too, may have experienced a slap in my life, and am therefore speaking as a connoisseur.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.
— Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
...But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Suffering with another is typically not pure suffering
—  there is some good or positive in this experience.