1.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To exist is to endure, to prevail is to uncover purpose in the hardship.
2.
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Nature demonstrates that as intellect expands, the potential for anguish intensifies, and it is only with maximum intelligence that distress reaches its peak.
3.
Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
Tennessee Williams
4.
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
Chinua Achebe
6.
On September 11 2001, America felt its vulnerability even to threats that gather on the other side of the Earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat from any source that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.
George W. Bush
7.
And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.
Martin Sheen
8.
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
Franz Kafka
9.
The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.
Thomas Merton
10.
Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.
Ram Dass
11.
Wisdom comes alone through suffering.
Aeschylus
12.
I don't think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don't think it's one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them--as many as there are people--because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths.
Charles de Lint
13.
Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering.
Theodore Roosevelt
15.
If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.
Simone Weil
17.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
George Orwell
18.
If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.
Elbert Hubbard
19.
Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
Arthur Schopenhauer
20.
When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.
Mignon McLaughlin
21.
Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.
John Ruskin
22.
I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.
Oscar Wilde
23.
It's nice to be happy. But the meaning of life is meaning - what's the impact you're having on the world. Suffering to accomplish that is a perfectly fine thing.
Reid Hoffman
24.
A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.
Jules Renard
25.
Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.
Franz Kafka
26.
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
Susan Sontag