c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I know positively… that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes… it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free, except death.
— Albert Camus
Through God's grace, he gives us a wealth of resources to bear any burden he allows. Therefore, if God doesn't empty our cup of suffering or take it from us, he will give ample grace (favor, kindness, ability) to bear it.
— Jennifer Rothschild, God Is Just Not Fair: Finding Hope When Life Doesn’t Make Sense
Our task is to take suffering in stride, not as if it is a pleasure (it isn’t), but in the knowledge that God will not let it overwhelm us and that He will use it, by His own supernatural alchemy, to three good ends, at least. 1) Our suffering produces character; 2) Our suffering glorifies God; 3) Suffering fulfills the law of the harvest (John 12:24), Rediscovering Holiness by J.I. Packer, pgs. 232-239.
— J.I. Packer
If you want a sense of purpose for experiencing pressures, use your knowledge of Jesus Christ's comforting, enlivening, energizing presence to be a comfort to others.
— William P. Barker
When things are good, it is because we remember a time when they were not. When there was pain. But now the pain is gone, so things are ‘good’. When we hurt, it is because we recall a time when we did not. When there was no pain. But now we suffer, so things are ‘bad’. The tiger sipped from the cup, peering at the boy over the rim. Stars swirled in its eyes. “Good. Bad. The cup holds both.
— Brooke Burgess, The Cat's Maw
Jesus says we are blessed when we are hated, ostracized, insulted, and ridiculed on earth, because of Him.
— brother Billy
Am reading the life of Mozart and cannot help thinking that one's capacity for suffering is in direct proportion to one's greatness.
— Lily Koppel, The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal
I envy these people. Wide-open suffering, their messes all hanging out. Lives boiled down to raw need--a near-holiness to it. And all of us driving our cars up and down the mountain--we'll go on forever trying to fool each other.
— Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More
No wise forward look can ignore the possibility of many sorrows and the certainty of some. Hope has ever something of dread in her eyes. The road will not be always bright and smooth, but will sometimes plunge down into grim cations, where no sunbeams reach. But even that anticipation may be calm. "Thou art with me" is enough. He who guides into the gorge will guide through it. It is not a cul de sac, shut in with precipices, at the far end; but it opens out on shining tablelands, where there is greener pasture.
— Alexander MacLaren
All continuous suffering, is self inflicted.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Make sure your fun is not mocking someone’s pain and your enjoyment is not another’s suffering. The melody of your ears must not be the cries of a powerless.
— Shahla Khan, Friends With Benefits: Rethinking Friendship, Dating & Violence
Through the round of many births I roamed without reward, without rest, seeking the house-builder. Painful is birth again & again.House-builder, you're seen!You will not build a house again.All your rafters broken,the ridge pole destroyed,gone to the Unformed, the mind has come to the end of craving.
— Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada
Suffering reminds us of our brokenness, our humanity. It disarms us of our self-absorption and magnifies our need for one another.
— Marquita Burke-DeJesus, Radically Ordinary
The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke
—  there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.
There is, in fact, no safeword for chemical burns under one’s fingernails.
— Agnostic Zetetic
Where neither go wrong, the naive only see the world as a victim of bad doctrine; the cynic only sees good doctrine as a victim of the world.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Why do we come to the world, only to suffer and depart? This is a unsolved misery.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You don’t change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person’s place for a while, one suffering person at a time.
— Geoffrey Wood, Leaper: The Misadventures of a Not-Necessarily-Super Hero
Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.
— Geoffrey Wood, Leaper: The Misadventures of a Not-Necessarily-Super Hero
Peace....Henrietta was not quite sure what it was but she knew it was very important. If one wanted it, Grandfather had told her once, one must not hit back when fate hit hard but must allow the hammer-strokes to batter out a hollow place inside one into which peace, like cool water, could flow.
— Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells
Daydreaming is the purest form of being. Take that away and One suffers.
— Solange nicole
Siddhartha embarked on a mission that human civilization has been on since its inception – How to overcome pain and suffering in human life. Siddhartha was perhaps the first scientist on the planet who wanted to address pain and suffering at their roots. While every other thinker from every other religious traditions speculated on the goals of life and afterlife, such speculative queries were nonsensical for Siddhartha for in the mold of a true scientist, he saw no evidential basis for them. Siddhartha didn’t even query what is pain, and where does it come from. He directed his query on how can pain and suffering be removed, an enquiry no speculative philosopher had undertaken before.
— Ajit Kumar Jha, Siddhartha Smiles
I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
Suffering has a noble purpose.
— Marquita Burke-DeJesus, Radically Ordinary
God allows us to face the tension whether we like it or not.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
It’s easy to thank God and to be happy when you live a sheltered life and have no concept of suffering
—  Suffer and then do all of the above.
Those who suffer suffer because hurt people hurt people, and busy people let it happen. So am I going to be busy or am I going to be brave?
— Marquita Burke-DeJesus, Radically Ordinary
I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.
— David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative
I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.
— Isabel Allende, Maya's Notebook
A sincere and warmly-expressed apology can produce the same effects as morphine on a suffering soul.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Most of the dreams that have suffered to death were murdered by their own owners.
— Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream
But how to be present to another? Our hearts are so hard. We are so insensitive to the suffering of others. We must pray the Holy Spirit to change our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh so that we may give life, for love is giving of life and liberty. By our confidence in another we can bring forth new aspirations and a taste for life in him. We can help the miserable person to live, to progress and to grow. And he will only begin to want to live when he has been told by our gestures, words, the tone of our voice, our look, our whole being that it is important that he live.
— Jean Vanier, Eruption to Hope
Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you how to stop suffering. That is its purpose.
— Seth (Spirit), Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul
Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror." Paul was pleased that man was gradually covering the whole earth with concrete. It was as if he were watching a cruel murderess being walled up.
— Milan Kundera, Immortality
Followers of Jesus stake their claim on the firm belief that God will one day heal the planet of pain and death. Until that day arrives, the case against God must rely on incomplete evidence. We cannot really reconcile our pain-wracked world with a loving God because what we experience now is not the same as what God intends. Jesus himself prayed that God's will "be done, on earth as it is in heaven," a prayer that will not be fully answered until evil and suffering are finally defeated.
— Philip Yancey, The Question That Never Goes Away
No one can sing well, play well, or write well, without living through moments of the deepest pain and anguish. Every real talent has known times of torturing depression when the heart in its agony has cried out to God: “Why hast Thou forsaken me? What have I done that I should suffer so?" And then, at the very darkest moment, suddenly, the veil is torn from their eyes! Truth, with her flaming torch, stands before them, and they understand that God sends them suffering to strengthen and ennoble their talent, that it may touch men's hearts and show to tired wanderers on earth glimpses of heaven.
— Aimée Dostoyevsky, The Emigrant
…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.
— Lydia Millet, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
One who walks in blindness and confusion cries out more than one who knows why he is suffering.
— Davin Turney
... he was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness."Damn it," he sighed. "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!
— Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth
Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
— Chuck Palahniuk
Are you so dead inside you don't feel the daily anguish, terror and deathly suffering of millions? What happened to you? You've changed.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Those who have suffered in the hands of others,know what it is to be free.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Every moment is brand new, but we often fill the new with fear of the future or pain of the past instead of simply enjoying the present.
— Vivian Amis, The Essentials of Life
Resurrection hope turned those who believed it into a counter-empire, an alternative society that knew the worst that tyrants could do and knew that the true God had the answer.
— Bible Review
Intelligence is often worshiped, even when that intelligence allows unfathomable injustice and suffering to occur under its smart watch.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
We much be greater than what we suffer
— the amazing spiderman
Your suffering needs to be respected. Don't try to ignore the hurt, because it is real. Just let the hurt soften you instead of hardening you. Let the hurt open you instead of closing you. Let the hurt send you looking for those who will accept you instead of hiding from those who reject you.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
For those who praise God and say “God is good,” or, ‘I’m so blessed,” when you get what YOU want, try praising Him and saying, “God is good,” and “I’m so blessed,” when you’re suffering. To do the first is effortless. The masses do it, that's how easy it is. To do the latter requires something greater: strength, faith and gratitude - no matter the ouch involved.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.
— Paulo Coelho
Penance is a sacrifice, a voluntary punishment to show remorse for a sin. The more grievous the sin, the greater the self-inflicted suffering. For some, the ultimate penance is death. But for others, it simply a means to an end.
— Emily Thorne
Out of our suffering we emerge. Our struggles are really our only hope.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Your suffering is there to inspect you and perfect you. We are made complete by our pain.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Just because you spent 4 years studying a subject doesn't mean you have to spend the rest 40 years suffering it.
— Dhaval Gajera, Tomorrow Today
We didn't let them do anything to us, Travanion," Beatriss said fiercely, "They did it without out permission.
— Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles
If life really begins at forty, then all poor people die in their teens.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
All your troubles, struggles, pains and suffering is worth one good thing.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
I know i am touching the living body of Christ in the broken bodies of the hungry and the suffering.
— Mother Teresa
If you don't accept and respect your suffering, it isn't going anywhere.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Your suffering needs to be respected.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Your pain is reminding you that the gift of life is tender and precious. Suffering cuts to the quick of aliveness.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Eons of suffering, brutality and struggle have paved the way through the corridors of time to create this moment, where you exist as an exalted expression of life.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
God doesn’t promise us escape from suffering or pain. Rather, He promises to miraculously use even bad situations for your ultimate good.
— Jim George, One-Minute Insights for Men
Pleasure! The end of suffering or the beginning of an enjoyment?
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Avoiding pain causes endless suffering for you and others. Avoiding pain is really selfishness.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Do not be a "go along, get along" person when it comes to the suffering of others. Integrity is not a popularity contest. Stand for love!
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
They say our suffering is an inevitable part of the human condition
—  just accept it. But the greatest human skill is that of a choice maker.
It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951
Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
At some point, we have each said through our tears, "I'm suffering for a love that's not worth it." We suffer because we feel we are giving more than we receive. We suffer because we feel we are giving more than we receive. We suffer because our love is going unrecognized. We suffer because we are unable to impose our own rules.But ultimately there is no good reason for our suffering, for in every love lies the seed of our growth.
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: "He is nothing but a boy -- a little boy!
— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
The trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.
— José Saramago, Blindness
It's a difficult truth to face that some people choose to define themselves by the pain they feel or the wrongs they've suffered. They're not going through hard times so much as making all times hard.
— Dani Harper
A troubled life beats having no life at all
— Richard M. Cohen, Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness: A Reluctant Memoir
I mean, you may cause others a spot of bother by your weaknesses, perhaps, but coping with you may possibly increase their strength and sympathy. But if you sin deliberately, even if it seems only against yourself--well--you won't be the only one to suffer. You may even be the one who suffers least.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Rosemary Tree
Think about the suffering we cause ourselves internally through getting angry or jealous.
— Gyalwa Dokhampa, The Restful Mind
[Ilse] was suffering so keenly that she wanted to arraign the universe at the bar of her pain.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs
What ages you faster, suffering or experience?
— Leila Aboulela, Lyrics Alley
we shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will. And we shall continue to love you.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
The call of Christ is a call to live a life of sacrifice and loss and suffering--a life that would be foolish to live if there were no resurrection from the dead.
— John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist
She reminded him of (...) all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth!
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Everybody may have gone through the sufferings and pains of falling and failing in love earlier, may be many times.
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
I think it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering.
— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
We learn and experience ourselves only through suffering
—  everything else is humbug.
The human heart does not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.
— Lillian Smith
Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.
— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
— Mary Oliver
All pain seemed to come with lots of blood, and lots of mental anguish, too. I already knew about that. Maybe that was the worst kind of pain, because nobody knew about it but you.
— V.C. Andrews, My Sweet Audrina
Somewhere along the road many of us have picked up the belief that to change we must suffer. Some things are earned with work. But work is not suffering. Work is just work.
— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving To the Rhythms of Your True Self
I don't complain about the horror of life
—  I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can't even dream of being removed from my feeling of suffering.
Oh soul, you worry too much. Your arms are heavy with treasures of all kinds.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
Sacramental listening reminds us that current suffering isn’t the end of the story. God loves us deeply, and the vision for the future is vaster and more magnificent than we could ever imagine. In these moments of profound human presence, we are awakened to the divine presence and see that the kingdom of God is coming and yet is already here.
— Richard Rohr
To suffer together is to suffer with beauty...
— Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum
People who have been initiated "broke through in what felt like breaking down".
— Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation
... because Mr. Applebaum, who is ostensibly teaching us precalculus but is mostly teaching me that pain and suffering must be endured stoically, says, "You feel what, Tiny?".
— John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
We begin to realize that it will take something more powerful than we are to relieve our suffering. This is what we’ve been missing all along – a source of hope.
— Marta Mrotek, Miracle in Progress: A Handbook for Holistic Recovery
To toil, to think, to long, to grieve,—Is such my future fate?The morn was dreary, must the eveBe also desolate?
— Charlotte Brontë, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
You've been told that you're broken, that you're damaged goods and should be labeled victims. I don't buy it. The truth, instead, is that you are the only folks with the skills, determination, and values to ensure American dominance in this chaotic world.
— James Mattis
Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings.
— George MacDonald, The Curate of Glaston
Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.
— Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation
Well, hope for your thrilling career - but remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you - then someone else.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon
We would either have a silent, a soft, a perfumed cross, sugared and honeyed with the consolations of Christ, or we faint; and providence must either brew a cup of gall and wormwood, mastered in the mixing with joy and songs, else we cannot be disciples. But Christ’s cross did not smile on him, his cross was a cross, and his ship sailed in blood, and his blessed soul was sea-sick, and heavy even to death.
— Samuel Rutherford, Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself, Or, a Survey of Our Saviour in His Soule-Suffering, His Lovelynesse in His Death, and the Efficacie There
Because life, as Pablo Picasso averred, 'is a very bad novel', it has to be reworked through the writers' suffering into something much more meaningful, much more valuable. A life lived and relived, then, emitting intensity and beauty only achievable by a journey through pain.
— Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature
Anything is bearable as long as you can make a story out of it...
— M. Scott Momaday
Often the most tricky questions are the ones we secretly know the answers of.What are you running from?What are you waiting for?
— Sanhita Baruah
He remembered a version of himself untrammeled by expectation, unimpeded by Ego. He had suffered in the many years since then, seeking to return to that original self, if, in fact, it ever existed. And yet, he was helpless but to regard that unmistakable fear that gripped him in his dream as a sign that his unevenness lent him now to utter incongruity with this specter of past.
— Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species
Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have things different than the way they are - that is, our clinging or aversion.
— Noah Levine, Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
[S]how yourself a Christian, by suffering without murmuring; - in patience possess your soul: they lose nothing who gain Christ.
— Samuel Rutherford, A Selection from His Letters
From the essay on Love, in which he describes as a wilderness experience his daily visits with his wife to a hospital 3,000 miles from home in a strange city, where someone he loves is in danger of dying. “When the worst finally happens, or almost happens, a kind of peace comes. I had passed beyond grief, beyond terror, all but beyond hope, and it was thee, in that wilderness, that for the first time in my life I caught sight of something of what it must be like to love God truly. It was only a glimpse, but it was like stumbling on fresh water in the desert, like remembering something so huge and extraordinary that my memory had been unable to contain it. Though God was nowhere to be clearly seen, nowhere to be clearly heard, I had to be near him—even in the elevator riding up to her floor, even walking down the corridor to the one door among all those doors that had her name taped on it. I loved him because there was nothing else left. I loved him because he seemed to have made himself as helpless in his might as I was in my helplessness. I loved him not so much in spite of there being nothing in it for me but almost because there was nothing in it for me. For the first time in my life, there in that wilderness, I caught a glimpse of what it must be like to love God truly, for his own sake, to love him no matter what. If I loved him with less than all my heart, soul, and will, I loved him with at least as much of them as I had left for loving anything…I did not love God, God knows, because I was some sort of saint or hero. I did not love him because I suddenly saw the light (there was almost no light at all) or because I hoped by loving him to persuade him to heal the young woman I loved. I loved him because I couldn’t help myself. I loved him because the one who commands us to love is the one who also empowers us to love, as there in the wilderness of that dark and terrible time I was, through no doing of my own, empowered to love him at least a little, at least enough to survive. And in the midst of it, these small things happened that were as big as heaven and earth because through them a hope beyond hopelessness happened. “O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for evermore.”…The final secret, I think, is this: that the words “You shall love the Lord your God” become in the end less a command than a promise.
— Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces
Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
All suffering has an end, David, if only you wait long enough. Sorrow has its life like people. Sorrow is born and lives and dies. And when it's dead and gone, someone's left behind to remember it. Exactly like people.
— Anne Holm, I Am David
They called our arrangement a 'Death Pact' - but, really, that's not a phrase that tells you anything important. It's just the kind of phrase that sells newspapers. For us, it was never about death. It was about life. Knowing that there was a way out, that his suffering was not going to become unendurable (...).
— Gavin Extence, The Universe Versus Alex Woods
Because I couldn't bear my burden and have come to throw it on another: you suffer too, and I shall feel better! And can you love such a mean wretch?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
The so-called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism
—  they cannot bear for other people to flaunt the sufferings with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves.
I don't even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Let regret rewind your past and let secret remind your last.Regret is your blessing but secret is your suffering.
— Aram Seriteratai
Renunciation is not about pushing something away, it is about letting go. It's facing the fact that certain things cause us pain, and they cause other people pain. Renunciation is a commitment to let go of things that create suffering. It is the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others.
— Noah Levine, Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives
As I took up life as a minister, I tried to understand why so many people resisted and rejected God, I soon realized that perhaps that main reason was affliction and suffering. ...But at the same time, I learned that just as many people find God through affliction and suffering. They find that adversity moves them toward God rather than away. ...When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives, but that we never were.
— Timothy J. Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering
There is silly are people. You must suffer, or cause others to suffer, before you will have respect of one kind or the other from them...I will not stand to be looked at by anybody, especially when the looking is done with wrong thinking.
— Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley
Pain and suffering are two completely difference experiences. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is self-created.
— Noah Levine, Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.
— Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Finally, it is wrong to say that "nothing" is more basic to the identity of the church than suffering. Nothing is more basic to the identity of the institutional church than the preaching of the gospel, the correct administration of the sacraments, and the worship of God in Spirit and in truth (Westminster Confession of Faith, 25.4). Nothing is more basic to the identity of the individual Christian than faith, hope, obedience, and love, the fruit of the Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 13:4-13; Gal. 5:22-24; 1 John 2:3; 3:10, 24; 4:7-21; 5:1-3).
— Keith A. Mathison, Postmillennialism
Until the Second Coming, sin will remain a part of earthly existence. And as long as there is sin, there will be suffering and pain. But suffering by persecution is not a sine qua non of the church. If it is, there are few if any true churches in North America today.
— Keith A. Mathison, Postmillennialism
There is pain and suffering in this world, but there is also joy, and not just suffering here and joy there, but suffering and joy in the very same place.
— Todd Neva, Heavy: Finding Meaning after a Terminal Diagnosis, A Young Family's First Year with ALS
When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.
— Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face
He was a phoenix of blood, rising from the ashes of those who had fallen and suffered before him.
— Nenia Campbell, Black Beast
My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals.
— Albert Sabin
Science itself, no matter whether it is the search for truth or merely the need to gain control over the external world, to alleviate suffering, or to prolong life, is ultimately a matter of feeling, or rather, of desire-the desire to know or the desire to realize.
— Louis de Broglie, Nouvelles perspectives en microphysique
Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!
— Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil and Other Works/Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies : A Dual-Language Book (Dover Foreign Language Study Guides)
Nothing, how little so ever it be, if it is suffered for God’s sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God.
— Thomas à Kempis
Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross.
— Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture
Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, En Route
It is good thing to learn the truth one's self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Faith is an action. He (one criminal on the cross) puts himself one step lower than where he was, sharing Jesus' place of poverty, insecurity, and the focus of rage. Remember me. And he will be remembered, because of his association with the Crucified One.
— Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture
Who are we aligning ourselves with? Are we aligning ourselves with the presence of God as it is abused, broken, bleeding, and mocked and scorned even now in this world? Do we take that one step down, risking insecurity, violence, guilt by association, to stand beside those who are both victim and accused, and public sinner – criminal and despised in society?
— Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture
… It was the knowing that there had been a happier time, a place of joy and peace and security, that made the sudden absence of it all so agonizing… Not the agony of what was, but the agony of what was no longer; this was the source of all life’s pain--not the fear of a hell to come, but rather the knowledge of an Eden that is no more. Hell isn't the punishment… Eden was.
— Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy
If ever in pain, I think the best thing we can do is to create something.
— Kamal Ravikant, Live Your Truth
She is no longer a solitary being. She is a million different parts, each reborn, granted the miracle she prayed for in the months before her death, to be completely healed. Death is the price for rebirth.Death. Who would have thought it would come with such great joy? Yet, after long years battling illness, death is suddenly more than welcome.
— Victoria Kahler, Luisa Across the Bay
The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Much more likely you’ll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,And has the nature of infinity.
— William Wordsworth
Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.
— Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Spiritual Writings
I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much.
— Gertrude B. Elion
Truth wears a crown of thorns
— Maria Faustina Kowalska
It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient. When anesthetics were discovered, pious people considered them an attempt to evade the will of God. It was pointed out, however, that when God extracted Adam's rib He put him into a deep sleep. This proved that anesthetics are all right for men; women, however, ought to suffer, because of the curse of Eve.
— Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity
The school of suffering never graduates any students, so ask God to teach to you the lessons He wants you to learn.
— Warren W. Wiersbe
One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives
The child will grow up and find out things for herself. She will know that I lied. She will be disappointed.""That is what is called learning the truth. It is a good thing to learn the truth one's self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
And yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.
— Plato, Phaedrus
No man can bear a child's cross.
— François Mauriac, The Woman of the Pharisees
today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it isalmost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensibleto the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clearconscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselvesto death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – thatOn the Genealogy of Morality4248 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153–4.49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137–9, pp. 140–1, pp. 143–4.50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs 31–7.is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-humanproposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as peoplesay, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act outa ‘demonstration’ of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is whatthe oldest and longest period in human history teaches us – and punishment,too, has such very strong festive aspects! –
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Suffering is like an echo - reflecting it only prolongs it.
— James L. Papandrea, Spiritual Blueprint: How We Live, Work, Love, Play, and Pray
suffering breaks us until there’s nothing left but gentleness
— John Geddes
Death breached the silence first. 'Mortals are always calling for me,' he said, 'Especially mortals whose suffering is very great, and especially mortals whose suffering is of their own making, and especially mortals who have never known suffering.
— J. Aleksandr Wootton, The Eighth Square
it is being honest about my painthat makes me invincible.
— Nayyirah Waheed
Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering
— Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Regardless of the subject of my films … I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see a man weeping at the bus stop, when I observe people struggling vainly to get close to others, when I see someone eating up the left-overs in a cheap restaurant, when I see the first blotches on a woman's hand and know that she too is bitterly aware of them, when I see the kind of appalling and irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face. I want this pain to come across to my audience, to see this physical agony, which I think I am beginning to fathom, to seep into my work.
— Krzysztof Kieślowski
Nobody is responsible for your sorrows and poverty, not even the devil. It is the work of the enemies of time that lives in some men, and their names are, 'Laziness and Procrastination'.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
The readiest way which God takes to draw a man to himself is, to afflict him in that he loves most, and with good reason; and to cause this affliction to arise from some good action done with a single eye; because nothing can more clearly show him the emptiness of what is most lovely and desirable in all the world.
— John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Foundations of Faith)
1) There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.2) An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.3) (Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.
— William L. Rowe, God and the Problem of Evil
He who has no faith in himself can never have faith in God. 
— Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 Vols.
God only knows the torment of the suffering soul and only he can take away the pain.
— Timothy W. Tron
If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie’s face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another.
— Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
You cant laugh at a joke agian and agian, but why do you keep crying over the same thing over and over agian?
— Monika Ramzy
I have to set an example, now more than ever. Facing death is the ultimate test of character. – Cmdr. William Riker
— Star Trek The Next Generation
On Good Friday last year the SS found some pretext to punish 60 priests with an hour on "the tree." That is the mildest camp punishment. They tie a man's hands together behind his back, palms facing out and fingers pointing backward. Then they turn his hands inwards, tie a chain around his wrists and hoist him up by it. His own wight twists his joints and pulls them apart...Several of the priest who were hung up last year never recovered and died. If you don't have a strong heart, you don't survive it. Many have a permanently crippled hand.
— Jean  Bernard, Priestblock 25487: a Memoir of Dachau
If all were perfect, what should we have to suffer from others for God's sake? But God has so ordained, that we may learn to bear with one another's burdens, for there is no man without fault, no man without burden, no man sufficient to himself nor wise enough. Hence we must support one another, console one another, mutually help, counsel, and advise, for the measure of every man's virtue is best revealed in time of adversity -- adversity that does not weaken a man but rather shows what he is.
— Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
The first days of January 1942 brought enormous amounts of snow. The reader already knows what snow meant for the clergy. But this time the torture surpassed the bounds of the endurable. At the same time the thermometer hovered between 5 and 15 degrees below zero. From morning till night we scraped, shoveled, and pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of snow to the brook. The work detail consisted of more than 1,000 clergymen, forced to keep moving by SS men and Capos who kicked us and beat us with truncheons.We had to make rounds with the wheelbarrows from the assembly square to the brook and back. Not a moment of rest was allowed, and much of the time we were forced to run.At one point I tripped over my barrow and fell, and it took me a while to get up again. An SS man dashed over and ordered me to turn with the full load. He ran beside me, beating me constantly with a leather strap. When I got to the brook I was not allowed to dump out the heavy snow, but had to make a second complete round with it instead.When the guard finally went off and I tried to let go of the wheelbarrow, I found that one of my hands was frozen fast to it. I had to blow on it with warm breath to get it free.
— Jean  Bernard, Priestblock 25487: a Memoir of Dachau
A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he's just another bird drinking from your misery.
— Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
After I binged last night -or was it tonight - I was convinced yet again that there were people coming to get me. It was more than just shadows and voices, more than just fantasies....it was real, and I was scared to my core.My bones were shaking...m heart was pounding...I thought I was going to explode. I'm glad I have you to talk to, to write this down. I tried to keep it all together, but then I gave in to the manes and became one with my insanity.
— Nikki Sixx, The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star
If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight—they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.
— Cesare Pavese