What is suffering? I’m not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and...

When you come to a place where you have to left or right,’ says Sister Ruth, ‘go straight ahead.

If there was a God, he’d guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I’d cut loose my pain, my longing.

We don’t like to hurt. And there is no worse pain for fallen people than facing an emptiness we cannot fill. To enter into pain seems rather foolish when we can run from it through...

it seemed to him that no matter what evils a man had committed, making him suffer purely for the sake of suffering was pointless. It didn’t undo the harm he had wrought; it didn’t please...

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.

Pain and suffering are two completely difference experiences. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is self-created.

When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, “Darling, I care about your suffering,” a deep healing begins.

If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he...

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

In the end when God does speak, it is not the pious friends who are commended. God tells then they have been guilty of misrepresenting God. Only Job – only angry, defiant, doubting Job has...

It takes great courage to open one’s heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world.

The school of suffering never graduates any students, so ask God to teach to you the lessons He wants you to learn.

You or I might think that at least one would show courage and put up a fight. But neither you nor I have suffered as they, and even we have born witness in silence to...

All suffering comes bearing a gift. Every pain is a portal. You must look at the hand of your suffering to see the gift it offers and peer into your pain to see where it...

If love were human I would’ve set them on fire by now — a screaming blaze of smoke and flesh. I’d breathe in the blackness once more just to feel love’s destruction, its mortality filling...

The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how...

Everything that God sends us is beautiful, even though we may not understand it – and we only need to give it some proper thought to see that what God gives is just sheer happiness;...

When you observe that the fire in your room is getting dull, you do not always put on more coal, but simply stir with the poker; so God often uses the black poker of adversity...

All suffering has an end, David, if only you wait long enough. Sorrow has its life like people. Sorrow is born and lives and dies. And when it’s dead and gone, someone’s left behind to...

— This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.—Who knows it better?—Yet you believe?Kumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret....

That is the idea — that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for...

scraps” that the abusive priests treated us like. They would use us as a scrap is used and then simply toss us aside. I was moved to tears. Holding it in my hands, I could...

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is...

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.

But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a...

We can only forgive the world to the extent that we forgive ourselves for being in it.

We know—more from the faces immortalized on a handful of photographs than from the words of survivors—that the women and men who experienced that moment in Hiroshima believed they had encountered the beginning of the...

I envy these people. Wide-open suffering, their messes all hanging out. Lives boiled down to raw need–a near-holiness to it. And all of us driving our cars up and down the mountain–we’ll go on forever...

She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of...

He were found drowned. He were coming home very hopeless o’ aught on earth. He thought God could na be harder than men; mappen not so hard; mappen as tender as a mother; mappen tenderer....

Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to...

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we...

Am reading the life of Mozart and cannot help thinking that one’s capacity for suffering is in direct proportion to one’s greatness.

Walk through pain, face it, lay down in it and rest. Get up and walk again, repeat until you reach the end.

Faith can be stirred within the walls of church buildings, but faith is formed and nourished in the waiting rooms of hospitals, helplessly witnessing a thirty-one-year-old sister suffer, holding kids affected by the AIDS epidemic,...

You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that...

Ann: How does God’s character fit into things that seem totally against his character?

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

This time around I was so lonely that I was forced to be face to face with myself. Realizing at the end of the day I only have me and I didn’t seem to like...

The trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.

…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling...

…it’s always somebody’s fault – I blame you for my helpless love – do you think I chose this? Your beauty compelled me…

You may die a hundred deaths without a break in the mental turmoil. Or, you may keep your body and die only in the mind. The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom.

My pain builds like storm clouds―massive, dark, and heavy with teardrops. Moisture falls torrential as if my world is a violent, eternal downpour; however, at long last the source runs dry and the bitter storm...

Do you know what it is?’ [Toby] said thoughtfully. ‘It’s that they haven’t had anything really awful happen to them. No wonder they seem so superficial and unfeeling.’ It was certainly an interesting theory, …...

But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.

The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop a poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously,...

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh,...