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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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“'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

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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.” W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death.” Albert Camus, The Fall

“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

“why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?” George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.” Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

“They’re a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It’s said that without whisky to soak and soften the world, they’d kill themselves.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.” John Green, Paper Towns

“what we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.” Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“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

“He was too well accustomed to suffering, and had suffered too much where he was, to bewail the prospect of change very severely.” Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them” Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

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

“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

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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)
Albert Camus (2)
Victor Hugo (2)
Michel de Montaigne (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)
A Game of Thrones (2)
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (2)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (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)
The Moon and Sixpence (1)
The Alchemist (1)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1)
Kafka on the Shore (1)
Romeo and Juliet (1)
The Plague (1)
Jane Eyre (1)
Dance Dance Dance (1)
East of Eden (1)