3,815 Quotes About Suffering

Often it’s hard to differ pain and joy,Some give up on differentiating

If your mind is clear and at peace, then your path leads to joy and happiness. However, if your mind is cluttered and frantic, then your path leads to suffering and frustration.

Mental pain is usually caused, not by our being pushed by life to where we do not want—or away from where we want—to be, but by the friction caused by our resistance to the push.

Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent,more perfect than all that a man can invent.

But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, Is Humility.

I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.

Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, you'd feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.

When we forgive others, we give ourselves permission to let go of our own suffering.

You or I might think that at least one would show courage and put up a fight. But neither you nor I have suffered as they, and even we have born witness in silence to lesser ills under less dire threat. Yet, in the face of evil, to sit silent is an even greater evil. Complacency is ever the enabler of darkest deeds;