Quotes about Suffering

The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.

War is not the only arena where peace is done to death. Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned.

But we get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it. It becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission, and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!

I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty towards myself, I have a fellow-felling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest towards them. It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal—because his life is so short, and I would have it, is possible, filled with happiness and not misery

There was no reason why I should go anywhere. The world about me seemed like a vision that was hurrying by while I stood still with my pain.