Quotes about Suffering

What we desperately do want to avoid is not merely suffering but suffering without meaning.

Simply suffering—that is what will be needed then—not parries, blows or thrusts such as may still be possible or admissible in the preliminary fight; the real struggle that perhaps lies ahead must simply be to suffer faithfully... For sometime the church struggle hasn't even been about what it appears to be about; the lines have been drawn somewhere else entirely.

Most British citizens had never seen anyone branded or whipped or subjected to thumbscrews. They had no idea that conditions on West Indian sugar plantations were so brutal that most of the slaves were literally worked to death in just a few years and most of the female slaves were too ill to bear children.

Don Quixote was for Bonhoeffer an important picture of the human condition.

He now began to think of the church as called by God to "stand with those who suffer".

To renounce a full life and its real joys in order to avoid pain is neither Christian nor human.

Stifter once said, "Pain is a holy angel, who shows treasures to men which otherwise remain forever hidden; through him men have become greater than through all joys of the world.

This is the very thing that has driven people to suicide through the centuries. It is hopelessness made real, or to use Milton's famous phrase, it is "darkness visible," a description that the author William Styron used as a title for his own poignant memoir on depression.

If our suffering has a purpose, it is infinitely easier to bear than if our suffering has no purpose and no larger meaning. When a mother endures childbirth, she knows that it is leading to something life changing and glorious.

In one conversation that September in Geneva, Visser 't Hooft asked Bonhoeffer what he prayed for. "If you want to know the truth," Bonhoeffer replied, "I pray for the defeat of my nation. For I believe that is the only way to pay for all the suffering which my country has caused in the world.

We who are sometimes obsessed with social conscience can no longer imagine a world without it, or a society that regards the suffering of the poor and others as the "will of God.

Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.