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,...

For me, an area of moral clarity is: you’re in front of someone who’s suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.

We are not a voice for the voiceless. The truth is that there is a lot of noise out there drowning out quiet voices, and many people have stopped listening to the cries of their...

…if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection;...

As I took up life as a minister, I tried to understand why so many people resisted and rejected God, I soon realized that perhaps that main reason was affliction and suffering. …But at the...

This of course no problem. People are suffering all around the world, and I’m fine whatever I do and wherever I am.

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...

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

It’s easy to thank God and to be happy when you live a sheltered life and have no concept of suffering; Suffer and then do all of the above.

The animals feel that this urgency is mutual. Their own suffering has made them aware of human suffering. More frequent contact with us has sensitized them to what troubles us. They feel our anxiety and...

Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships...