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.

…you can’t rationalize suffering – it’s indeterminate – the real unknowable variable God substitutes in…

Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ’s Cross at the center of that history? . . . But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and–to repeat...

Can you admit on here that you have an affliction for millions of other people to see? Then that is great and a huge step towards your recovery.

Shannon: Only the living suffered. Only they were riddled with guilt and regret and unanswered questions.

The pain on the inside is what keeps you human,’ she said. ‘Never forget that.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like ‘living’ does not mean it necessarily...

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...

Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you how to stop suffering. That is its purpose.

When something happens to you, suffering doesn’t begin. Suffering begins at the instant you label a bad thing – as something that is wrong.

When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.

Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and...

It’s hard to know, isn’t it, whether the things we face are just because the world is full of sin and sinful people, or if God is working out a plan,’ Grandma continued. ‘I happen...

[…] 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…

Inside, my soul became so cold I hated everything. I even despised the sun, for I knew I would never be able to play in its warm presence.

That’s evolution. Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Suffer” he commanded seductively. “With me…or because of me.

Suffering is like an echo – reflecting it only prolongs it.

To identify with others is to see something of yourself in them and to see something of them in yourself–even if the only thing you identify with is the desire to be free from suffering.

If the angels were capable of envy, they would envy us for two things: one is the receiving of Holy Communion, and the other is suffering.

In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.

It is not the outer objects that entangle us. It is the inner clinging that entangles us.” – Tilopa

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

Winter arrived with December, and the world continued to suffer the loss of the Internet and most forms of communication. Supply chains were disrupted. The only mass form of personal communication was the letter, and...