Theology alone doesn’t convine anyone.Only those words which are pregnant with action, theology that is born of suffering, of struggles, of the poor–this theology is a testimony. This theology leads to conversion. (Leonardo Boff, p....

Pain without cause is a pain we can’t trust. We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.

Tko npr. formulira govor o Bogu Abrahamovu, Izakovu i Jakovljevu tako da se u njemu više ne čuje Jobov uzdisaj i tužaljka ‘Ta dokle još?’, taj se ne bavi teologijom nego mitologijom.

Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross.

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...

a flexible plan that includes pulling our troops back from the densely populated areas where they are suffering the worst casualties and to bring them home.

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...

All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

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...

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.

You will bring yourself the suffering you need to bring yourself so that you may awaken.

Everyone suffers at least one bad betrayal in their lifetime. It’s what unites us. The trick is not to let it destroy your trust in others when that happens. Don’t let them take that from...

… 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...

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly...

I alone knew what I had suffered. I alone knew what it felt like to be alive but dead.

God only knows the torment of the suffering soul and only he can take away the pain.

I was starting to come to grips with the fact that I had created a lot of pain and suffering around me, not just within me.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Afflictions are light when compared with what we really deserve. They are light when compared with the sufferings of the Lord Jesus. But perhaps their real lightness is best seen by comparing them with the...

Suffering usually relates to wanting things to be different from the way they are.

Jesus says we are blessed when we are hated, ostracized, insulted, and ridiculed on earth, because of Him.

He had pulled out of that grief, eventually – out from under the suffocating weight of it. Suffering had formed him: made him silent and deliberate, thoughtful: deep.

I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer’s, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, ‘Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who...

So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not....

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life...

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.

Dream thieves are those who leave their real dreams aside and struggle to pick other people’s dreams to work on. They suffer to do attempt what they can’t do,

I didn’t expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I’m living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in...

It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.

Hell, he now understood, went beyond simple torture. Hell inflicted agony with intermittent reprieves to maintain the hope of peace. Hell was not endless dark, but rare rays of sunlight to keep one’s eyes longing...

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...

To me, it is one world, and the non-human animals bear the brunt of oppression and suffering.

When I feel sad, I try to think of someone else in the world who is suffering worse than me. Like someone in Seattle, who is hurting so bad financially that instead of a vente...

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a...

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...

And you thought: they’re used to it. But that was how those who suffered less always thought about those who suffered more, that they were used to it, that they no longer felt it as...

Love is suffering only when one refuses to love.

I think it is very good when people suffer. To me that is like the kiss of Jesus.

That morning set in motion a series of events that caused me to wrestle with questions of God’s goodness.

Wisdom comes through suffering or old age.

Why the Romans, Father?” I asked him one afternoon. “Because, my child, they teach us how to bear suffering in a world of injustice where all faith is dead,” he answered.

I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words.

No. Go through the fire and I’ll be with you.

It made no sense to him, this idea that some people got God and some people didn’t.

Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our...

Some live for their own joy and pleasure. Some live to ease the burdens of others. Then there are those who seem to exist for pain’s sake only; that in the end the wrathful fire...

Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.

O what a blessed day that will be when I shall . . . stand on the shore and look back on the raging seas I have safely passed; when I shall review my pains...

/…/, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.

It’s true, I suffer a great deal–but do I suffer well? That is the question.