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.

People think I’m crazy to put myself through such torture, though I would argue otherwise. Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness. Dostoyevsky had it right: ‘Suffering is the sole...

Durch das Leid hindurch, nicht am Leid vorbei, geht der Weg zur Freude.

Our pasts shape us,Sam.None of us the person he or she used to be,it’s true, but what we are still contains a great proportion of what we once were.Nothing,not even suffering the worst kind of...

We didn’t let them do anything to us, Travanion,” Beatriss said fiercely, “They did it without out permission.

momentary.” They only last for a short time.

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

There’s no hierarchy in suffering. I think songs that are transcendent are the ones where everyone can feel something from it, you know?

She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up into the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke silently...

In suffering we find our truest selves.

The longer the trial to which God subjects you, the greater the goodness in comforting you during the time of the trial and in the exaltation after the combat.

Your life will always be the perfect classroom journey for you and every experience that shows up in your journey is here to serve you. There is meaning and purpose behind everything that happens. There...

People rarely ventured outside the realm of their own hurts. They believed their own suffering was obvious to all, but might as well have been wearing blinders for all that they noticed anyone else’s.

Renunciation is not about pushing something away, it is about letting go. It’s facing the fact that certain things cause us pain, and they cause other people pain. Renunciation is a commitment to let go...

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

God has chosen to save the world through the cross, through the shameful andpowerless death of the crucified Messiah. If that shocking event is therevelation of the deepest truth about the character of God, then...

Let me tell you, I have never suffered nor will ever suffer … only when I take upon myself the suffering of others do I appear to the suffering.

Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of scarifice

Without a word or hesitation, Pain took the mop from Nick. Suffering moved to pick up glass.”Wow. Where have you two been all my life?”Pain quirked and eyebrow as he mopped the floor.”Walking hand in...

Sometimes suffering is just suffering. It will not make you strong.

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

All to often, suffering exists in a realm beyond vocabulary so we navigate that realm awkwardly, fumbling for the right words, hoping we can somehow approximate an understanding of matters that should never have to...

Sometimes I can feel my darkness, like a fragment of nerves inside of me somewhere, sparking my hate. I picture it moving throughout my body, the other cells letting it pass by, yielding to its...

Although you and I have crossed each other, we two are destined by the heavens to be together. There will come a day when the two of us will join together to do great things....

To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.

Are you so dead inside you don’t feel the daily anguish, terror and deathly suffering of millions? What happened to you? You’ve changed.

If you don’t accept and respect your suffering, it isn’t going anywhere.

… everyone knows that ice cream is worth the trouble of being cold. Like all things virtuous, you have to suffer to gain the reward.

All Democrats are not entitlement people. These are the people who are going to suffer the cost of Obama health care. These are the people who are suffering because there’re no jobs.

Should I, too, prefer the title of ‘non-Jewish Jew’? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde...

One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man’s suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.

Did you,” so he asked him at one time, “did you too learn that secret from the river: that there is no time?”Vasudeva’s face was filled with a bright smile.”Yes, Siddhartha,” he spoke. “It is...

When you mature in your relationship with God you realize how suffering and patience are like eating your spiritual vegetables.

subvert” that brokenness.

Why don’t Jews drink? It interferes with their suffering.

Maybe he’s suffering from a case of jet lag. Is he suggesting that we be reduced to truant officers? It seems to me to be a plan obsessed with power and control.

A Brief for the DefenseSorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise...

We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the...