Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure.

Through spiritual maturity you will see new ways to avoid unnecessary suffering; wiser ways to endure unavoidable hardships with grace, and opportunities to turn your pain into lessons of service and healing for others.

When someone is suffering, there is a deep, visceral reaction in the core of our being, a flood of empathy and a frightfully desperate compulsion to give aid.

They” hate us because they feel–and “they” are not wrong–that it is within our power to do so much more, and that we practice a kind of passive-aggressive violence on the Third World. We do...

Christ wrought out His perfect obedience as a man, through temptation, and by suffering.

Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way

There always comes, I think, a sort of peak in suffering at which either you win over your pain or your pain wins over you, according as to whether you can, or cannot, call up...

Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

It is easy to tell the toiler How best he can carry his packBut no one can rate a burden’s weightUntil it has been on his back

Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.

Judged by the normal standards of human affairs, the lives of men and women of God may look overburdened with suffering, and even inconclusive.

The purpose of suffering is to contain the light of your desire until you see yourself in everything.

No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.

How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify,...

suffering is a misunderstood pain

… because Mr. Applebaum, who is ostensibly teaching us precalculus but is mostly teaching me that pain and suffering must be endured stoically, says, “You feel what, Tiny?”.

Anything is bearable as long as you can make a story out of it…

How I wish, how fervently I ache, to take my mother’s hand, kiss her check,tell her I love her, and watch her smile. For me it was not, nor can ever be. But for you,...

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

And as if suffering ever taught anybody a thing except to thank God when it ended.

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.

Even though life is hard, never make your life miserable, stressed and out weighed, you will burry yourself in stress.

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness – the desire to see...

Father, be near as we are surrounded by this cloud of deep suffering. Open our eyes to see that you are all things, the light and the darkness, not only those things that seem good...

When we oppose oppression, we lift our hands from the collective reins that empower such oppression.

Suffering often draws us closer to God. Instead of being a sign of God’s punishment or distance, suffering can purify us, lead us into the heart of God, and transform our souls.

I remember one teacher there — I can’t recall her name now. She was short and spare, and I remember her eager jutting chin. Quite unexpectedly one day (in the middle, I think, of an...

There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of secondary causality – in nature or history – is governed not only by a transcendent...

Don’t be afraid of suffering. Often scars are the medals of success.

If you weren’t built for this life, you’d be dead by now. i think the problem is people don’t share enough of their pain with the world, so they never know who else is in...

Alline knew that he could not do anything to make himself more saved, for the righteousness of Christ was sufficient. But he did see that what he did on the earth now would matter greatly...

Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

Sorrow is a sanctuary as long as self is kept outside. […] let us not foster, embrace, rekindle and indulge our grief. For then our sorrow is a selfish and luxurious fiction, a ground in...