quotations about suffering
What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation. I am separated. What I am separated from -- I cannot name it. But I am separated.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
The Confession
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
A morbid propensity that causes great suffering in domestic life is often curiously infectious to the very person for whom it creates most suffering.
ADA LEVERSON
Bird of Paradise
Nothing brings suffering as does
the untamed, uncontrolled unattended and unrestrained heart.
That heart brings suffering.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Anguttara Nikaya
When I am pained, I find the old theory of the uselessness of communicating the circumstances of it, singularly untenable.
ROBERT BROWNING
letter to Elizabeth Barrett, March 1, 1845
The suffering's here
The wait is gone
The streets are filled
With a hollow song
Got a new death
It lurks outside
Follows me home
DANZIG
"End of Time"
Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
The wound is the place where light enters you.
RUMI
attributed, Wild Essence: Return to the Peace & Freedom of Your Inner Wilderness
Courage! Suffering, when it climbs highest, lasts not long.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
This suffering, this unspeakable capacity to bleed and to know pain and to know annihilation, is what has to be overcome in this world of anyone is to reach God.
ANNE RICE
Memnoch the Devil