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Suffering quotes

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“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live in it.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The things we love destroy us every time” George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.” Jack London, The Star Rover

“Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.” Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?” Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.” W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“To become the spectator of one's own life . . . is to escape the suffering of life.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.” Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

“It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you; and besides, the Bible bids us return good for evil.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.” Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

“suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.” Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“For I can suffer, and be still; And come he slow, or come he fast, It is but Death who comes at last.” Walter Scott, Marmion

“Maybe people have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.” Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The longest way must have its close,—the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

“The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.” Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still.” Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are...” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.” John Green, Looking for Alaska

“there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.” Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

“'Does it hurt very much to die? ' Well, sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.” Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form...” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

“Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.” Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“They suffer, of course ... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it?” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.” Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.” Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian...” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“And how are the other weak ones to blame, because they could not endure what the strong have endured?” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“no matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.” Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.” Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.” H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Ay me! sad hours seem long.” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Well, quoth Friar John, as good sit still as rise up and fall; what cannot be cured must be endured.” François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

“For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering?” Albert Camus, The Plague

“it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.” Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“In short, my aunt stipulated, at one and the same time, that whoever came to see her must approve of her way of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and assure her of an ultimate recovery.” Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.” Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.” Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

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Related topics

indifference human nature death fear hell consciousness wisdom strength courage pain life love humanity heart happiness change man hope weakness cowardice

Related authors

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2)
William Shakespeare (1)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (8)
Haruki Murakami (4)
John Green (3)
Marcel Proust (3)
Charles Dickens (2)
Oscar Wilde (2)
Michel de Montaigne (2)
Albert Camus (2)
Victor Hugo (2)
Chuck Palahniuk (2)
George R. R. Martin (2)
Paulo Coelho (2)
W. Somerset Maugham (2)
Viktor E. Frankl (2)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1)
John Steinbeck (1)
Jane Austen (1)
Charlotte Brontë (1)

Related sources

Les Misérables (2)
The Brothers Karamazov (4)
Crime and Punishment (3)
Swann's Way (3)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (2)
A Game of Thrones (2)
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (2)
Looking for Alaska (2)
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2)
Man's Search for Meaning (2)
Waiting for Godot (1)
Kafka on the Shore (1)
The Moon and Sixpence (1)
The Alchemist (1)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1)
Romeo and Juliet (1)
The Plague (1)
Jane Eyre (1)
East of Eden (1)
Anna Karenina (1)