Top 200 Suffering Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 4

151. “Great souls suffer in silence.”

— Friedrich Schiller

152. “Suffering for Jesus is temporary. Pleasure in Jesus is eternal.”

— John Piper

153. “Life is a constant process of dying.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

154. “The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he cannot learn, feel change, grow or live...”

— William Arthur Ward

155. “In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

— George Orwell

156. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

— Ernest Hemingway

157. “When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”

— Albert Camus

158. “No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”

— Seneca the Younger

159. “Lord, I am willing To receive what You give. To lack what You withhold. To relinquish what You take, To suffer what You inflict, To be what you require.”

— Jerry Bridges

160. “We can’t learn without pain.”

— Aristotle

161. “All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

162. “Suffering presents us with a challenge: to find our goals and purpose in our lives that make even the worst situation worth living through.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

163. “Mindfulness is a mental activity that in due course eliminates all suffering.”

— Ayya Khema

164. “Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad. That causes an emotional contraction. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you. The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself.”

— Eckhart Tolle

165. “You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”

— Ernest Hemingway

166. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”

— Franz Kafka

167. “Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”

— Ram Dass

168. “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

169. “I don’t know how to live well. I only know how to suffer.”

— Bob Marley

170. “It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous – even death is terrible only if we fear it.”

— Epictetus

171. “When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to her who suffers, and try to help her.”

— Leo Tolstoy

172. “As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is “AUTHENTICITY”.”

— Charlie Chaplin

173. “Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance and beautiful silence.”

— David Goggins

174. “God is so committed to your ultimate joy that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself for you.”

— Timothy Keller

175. “Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.”

— Eckhart Tolle

176. “The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

177. “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

178. “Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.”

— Nhat Hanh

179. “Not to be able to stop thinking is an affliction, but we don’t realise this because almost everybody is suffering from it.”

— Eckhart Tolle

180. “Love until it hurts. Real love is always painful and hurts: then it is real and pure.”

— Mother Teresa

181. “Each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.”

— Pope John Paul II

182. “Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.”

— Ram Dass

183. “When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this – so accidental – just when everything was going well.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

184. “Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds – and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.”

— Sam Harris

185. “Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.”

— Ram Dass

186. “Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.”

— Ram Dass

187. “I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

188. “Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering and the lonely right there where you are.”

— Mother Teresa

189. “When you look deeply into your anger, you will see that the person you call your enemy is also suffering. As soon as you see that, the capacity of accepting and having compassion for them is there.”

— Nhat Hanh

190. “Trust yourself in God’s hands. Maintain your relationship to Jesus Christ by the patience of faith. ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’”

— Oswald Chambers

191. “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.”

— Elie Wiesel

192. “In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.”

— Elie Wiesel

193. “It is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.”

— Paramahansa Yogananda

194. “Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain.”

— Jim Morrison

195. “Cycling is suffering.”

— Fausto Coppi

196. “The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

— Tom Waits

197. “Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.”

— Henry David Thoreau

198. “Rather suffer an injustice than commit one.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

199. “A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.”

— Albert Camus

200. “Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.”

— Tim Ferriss