Jean de La Fontaine Quotes

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Courage! I have shown it for years; think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?

Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

Hope dies last.

I have watched men suffer the anguish of imprisonment, defy appalling human cruelty... break for a moment, then recover inhuman strength to defy their enemies once more.

To the last moment of his breath, On hope the wretch relies; And even the pang preceding death Bids expectation rise.

Life is stronger than death.

Better to suffer than to die.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

I always have this image of a woman running across a desert carrying children, trying to find water and food, not knowing when they'll get that. And her feet are slashed up from the dry, hard earth... Even when I'm uncomfortable, sometimes in pain, or just cold... I think, 'Thank God for what I've got.'

We are very near the end, but have not and will not lose our good cheer.

I've always believed in survival.

There should be weeping at a man's birth, not at his death.

The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It's worth being bashed against. It's worth getting scarred by. It's worth pouring yourself over every one of its coals.

I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.

Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things - with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope.

I think you make the best with what you've got, you know? Sometimes you have very little. And you just always try to rise to higher ground, because you're going to suffer one way or the other, so you just hope that you have strength and perseverance and good friends and faith, some kind of faith, to endure and move on to greener pastures.

What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.

Be patient, my soul: thou hath suffered worse than this.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

Latin Americans hold on tight even to pain and suffering, preferring a certain present to an uncertain future. Some of this is only natural, entirely human. But for us, the fear is paralyzing; it generates not only anxiety but also paralysis.