Strong people alone know how to organize their suffering so as to bear only the most necessary pain.

Most of our suffering comes from avoidance.

The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi.

There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.

One suffers in silence so long as one has the strength and when that strength fails one speaks without measuring one’s words much.

Learning comes from books; penetration of a mystery from suffering.

I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it...

When shall I be dead and rid Of all the wrong my father did? How long, how long ’till spade and hearse Put to sleep my mother’s curse?

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...

Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering the converse does. The brave who focus and all things good and all things beautiful to give thanks for it and discover...

I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an...

Out of our suffering we emerge. Our struggles are really our only hope.

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!

I can hear your angered silence,Taste your bitterness.Now I smell your vengeance,Yet see your lonely emptiness.I am your broken heart.

The secrets of alchemy exist to transform mortals from a state of suffering and ignorance to a state of enlightenment and bliss.

I loathe, detest, hate and abominate the block, the gibbet, the rack, the pillory and the faggots with equal passion,” said the old man vehemently. “Not only are they devilishly cruel but they are not...

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,...

For many of us, especially being so fortunate to live in a first-world country, the vast majority of pain we experience is due to the seriousness with which we identify with our thoughts.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no...

No one is ever holy without suffering.

Without hope, there is no despair. There is only meaningless suffering.

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...

As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.

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...

Some are born richWhile others poor;Some are born freeWhile others captives;Some are born blessedWhile others deprived;Some are born strongWhile others weak;And some are born greatWhile others slaves.It is only in this lifeblessings are unequal.

To love life is to love all of life; the suffering, the joy, the pain, the magnificence…all of it!

Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it...

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.

It’s going to be a hard time; we can count on that. But with all the misery, what opportunities to show mercy and brotherly love in our land, which has sinned so greatly against love....

After years in utter darkness, I force my eyes into the light. For I must retain my sight, that I might view the wholeness of the void, objectively.

The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.

Sometimes it takes great suffering to pierce the soul and open it up to greatness

Every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a...

God gave you life to live happily not to suffer heavily. I felt sufferment.

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...

And yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.

I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love.

Oh soul, you worry too much. Your arms are heavy with treasures of all kinds.

Part of me was afraid that if I raised my fist to the sky and demanded an answer now, I would hear a thundering and calloused, ‘Because I said so,” from God in heaven. And...

This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river’s current, that box of stone closed...

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...

I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and grovelling submission to those you can’t. Once having set up her idols and built altars to the, it was imevitable that she would worship there. It was...

I swore that I would not suffer from the world’s grief and the world’s stupidity and cruelty and injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind...

Scholarship that is indifferent to human suffering is immoral.

The problem with all students, he said, is that they inevitably stop somewhere. They hear an idea and they hold on to it until it becomes dead; they want to flatter themselves that they know...

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,And has the nature of infinity.

She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered ‘different.’ She did not suffer too much.

God’s forgot that ever I lived… He’s forgot…and He never cared, nohow….”He smoothed her brown, rough-palmed hand; he held her hands to keep her from jerking herself away from his admonishing: “Oh, ’tis not true,...

Your pain is reminding you that the gift of life is tender and precious. Suffering cuts to the quick of aliveness.