Victor Hugo Quotes

Is there anything more true than human pain? Is there anything more sincere than the cry for help from those who suffer? Only a great wave of mankind's pity can surmount an immense wave of human misery?

There's something universal about illness... Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, 'Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it's going to be alright.'

For we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.

Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

It is far more humane to prevent suffering than to alleviate it after it has occurred.

Whether or not one has won the Nobel Prize, each of us living in contact with our fellowmen feels a joint responsibility for all forms of suffering, both physical and moral.

I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that's what I thought. Now I know: all pain is the same. Only the details are different.

It is by no means a fact that death is the worst of all evils; when it comes it is an alleviation to mortals who are worn out with sufferings.

. . .only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.

Who can take away suffering without entering it?

To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.

To each his suff'rings: all are men, / Condemn'd alike to groan, / The tender for another's pain; / Th' unfeeling for his own.

Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

If suffering were an unavoidable part of our existence, we should try to alleviate it as far as possible in practical, earthly ways.

As she watched all of this, Liesel was certain that these were the poorest souls alive. That's what she wrote about them . . . Some looked appealingly at those who had come to observe their humiliation, this prelude to their deaths. Others pleaded for someone, anyone to step forward and catch them in their arms. No one did.

All human suffering concerns each human being.

Everyone is in pain.No matter where they come from or what you think of them. Sorrow spares no one

We must recognize that the suffering of one person or one nation is the suffering of humanity.

I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.

In order to do anything about the suffering of the world we must have the strength to face it without turning away.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

I believe in the power of every human being to end suffering.

My soul refuses to be satisfied so long as it is a helpless witness of a single wrong or a single misery.

Instead of being satisfied to alleviate suffering, we shall labor hard and continually to prevent it.