Quotes about Suffering

God has not abandoned us any more than he abandoned Job. He never abandons anyone on whom he has set his love; nor does Christ, the good shepherd, ever lose track of his sheep.

Every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die.

If the first mark of a true and living church is love, the second is suffering. The one is naturally consequent on the other. A willingness to suffer proves the genuineness of love.

There are none in hell but what have been haters of God, and so have procured His wrath and hatred on themselves; and there they shall continue to hate Him forever.

Licitis perimus omnes

The conquest of fear, especially fear of unaccountable divine beings who meddle in nature at will, means a reduction in the sum total of human pain and suffering and opens the door to the calm acceptance of a new picture of the world—a world in which nature is autonomous and where there are ideal beings who never meddle.

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.