Good. Bad. The cup holds both.

People often ask: If there’s a God, how can He allow so much suffering in the world? Realize all world suffering you perceive is a mirror to your own psychological self-abuse, gender imbalance, prejudice, poverty,...

Everything burned, everyone lied, and no one paid for it but the ones in the muck.

We may not understand why certain things occur in our lives, but we understand who to run to when they do.

No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life...

Thunderstorms are as much our friends as the sunshine.

…having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.

He enables [his children] to walk before him; he holds their hand in difficulties; he himself carries them along in hardships that he sees as being otherwise unbearable to them.

Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings.

Alas! we must suffer ourselves before we can feel for others.

I want to suffer so that I may love.

The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self. All those people...

I understand you.—You do not suppose that I have ever felt much.—For four months, Marianne, I have had all this hanging on my mind, without being at liberty to speak of it to a single...

Unless death is made a lesson for the living, the life lived is wasted.Why should life come into existence only to be destroyed? One dies and another is born—for what? A few miserable hours of...

It’s not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.

I’ve been asked whether we can justify trying to protect wildlife when there’s so much human suffering on the planet but the two are actually not exclusive.

Quite honestly, there are days when I don’t need a God who will deliver me from the pit, just a God who will get down in a pit with me.

I must give due praise to the man who first extracted morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped seven minutes after the injection. Interesting: the pain passed over me...

The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one’s one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.

Jesus went without comfort so that you might have it. He postponed joy so that you might share in it. He willingly chose isolation so that you might never be alone in your hurt and...

When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician’s role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient’s wishes.

But pain’s like water. It finds a way to push through any seal. There’s no way to stop it. Sometimes you have to let yourself sink inside of it before you can learn how to...

Murder rectifies nothing.

When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn’t write a novel,...

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one’s own suffering

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.

The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.

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...

I don’t feel like I can change the world. I don’t even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering.

I am grateful to realize that my desires do not entitle me to add to another’s suffering.

We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God’s fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for ‘the bush was not consumed.

God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.

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.

In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so – that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we...

[…] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole...

We don’t have a major problem right now in our country, and life is normal. Things like unemployment, which the youth are suffering from, and the rate of inflation – these are chronic conditions and...

It brings spiritual warfare and suffering for the priest as he identifies with those who suffer, and shares the frustrations, anger, and incomprehensibility of that suffering in what it does to those who suffer. The...

Your suffering is here to help you unfold and to awaken into compassion, love and strength.

One day we took the children to see a goldsmith refine gold after the ancient manner of the East. He was sitting beside his little charcoal fire. (“He shall sit as a refiner”; the gold-...

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...

While God is not the author of evil and He never prompts or condones sin, nothing occurs without His sovereign oversight. Others may choose to do evil deeds and God’s people may suffer in the...

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with youall through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.Comforter, where, where is your comforting?Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a...

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of...

It is ironic that constructive thinkers are often misunderstood as negative, as they differ from those longing for positivity: constructive thinkers have been conditioned to find positive in negative rather than suffering from the negative...

Compassion doesn’t arise from the belief that the evil in the world is somebody else’s fault or that it is a result of poor choices a suffering person has made.

Suffering occurs when love’s two hands pull your soul in two directions.

That the other suffers has to be learned; and it can never be learned fully.

It was pleasant to think that men still sang, even in the midst of butchery and famine.

It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated…