Louise Bogan Quotes

I was starting to come to grips with the fact that I had created a lot of pain and suffering around me, not just within me.

If you suffer it is because of you, if you feel blissful it is because of you. Nobody else is responsible - only you and you alone. You are your hell and your heaven too.

The fighter (like the writer) must stand alone. If he loses he cannot call an executive conference and throw off on a vice president or the assistant sales manager. He is consequently resented by fractional characters who cannot live outside an organization.

Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

I do not believe in collective guilt.

I am the source of my own suffering, because of the habits of my mind.

I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don't despise it. But it can't quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it.

There is no enemy can hurt us but by our own hands. Satan could not hurt us, if our own corruption betrayed us not. Afflictions cannot hurt us without our own impatience. Temptations cannot hurt us, without our own yieldance. Death could not hurt us, without the sting of our own sins. Sins could not hurt us, without our own impenitence.

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.

Your suffering is never caused by the person you're blaming.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.

The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.

Suffering must be the inevitable tariff exacted from spirit for residing in human form.

The gospel is never about everybody else; it is always about you, about me. The gospel is never truth in general; it's always a truth in specific. The gospel is never a commentary on ideas or cultures or conditions; it's always about actual persons, actual pains, actual troubles, actual sin; you, me; who you are and what you've done; who I am and what I've done.

If any man has done wrong, the harm is his own. But perhaps he has not done wrong.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Though I was standing in front of a mirror, I wasn't really seeing my reflection. I was seeing, very clearly, that—at the moment—I was all in the world that Eric could think of as his own. I had better not fail him.

Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.

I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, of this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

Blame neither man, nor God, nor anyone in the world. When you find yourselves suffering, blame yourselves, and try to do better.

...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.