Quotes about Suffering

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

I don't feel there is any spiritual or metaphysical justification for turning our backs on human suffering.

I don't feel there is any spiritual or metaphysical justification for turning our backs on human suffering.

What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.

The need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short.

The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding; but it was not for pain that he sobbed ; it was because he was all alone, because he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight.

By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. . . Murder kills only the individual - and, after all, what is an individual?

At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized London he was suffering because he could not escape from those communal activities, never be quietly alone.

Are you sure?" asked the Savage. "Are you quite sure that the Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn't been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who's wounded and bleeding to death?