Sydney J. Harris Quotes

Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

Don’t worry about me handling the pain," I say. "I’ve had a lot of practice.

You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.

I don't see life as an opportunity to see how far you can go in the pursuit of pain, although I think I've challenged it a bit.

The burden of suffering seems a tombstone hung about our necks, while in reality it is only the weight which is necessary to keep down the diver while he is hunting for pearls.

People play with pain all the time.

There are those who suffer and grow strong; there are those who suffer and grow weak. This mystery of pain is still for me the saddest of earth's disabilities.

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.

Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain Clings cruelly to us.

You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn’t that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that’s why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can’t measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question really is, Why doesn’t that pain make you say, I won’t do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don’t.

Suffering is optional. You’re gonna have some pain but it doesn’t have to make you suffer.

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.

Seeing things a human shouldn't have to see makes us human.

Because all my life I've learned to suffer in silence - Athena

It’s the same with people who say, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.

The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel

We must learn to suffer more.

Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.