Alleviating Suffering Quotes

Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.

We are all here on this planet, as it were, as tourists. None of us can live here forever. The longest we might live is a hundred years. So while we are here we should try to have a good heart and to make something positive and useful of our lives. Whether we live just a few years or a whole century, it would be truly regrettable and sad if we were to spend that time aggravating the problems that afflict other people, animals, and the environment. The most important things is to be a good human being.

So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.

Why does God bless us with abundance? So we can have enough to live on and then use the rest for all manner of good works that alleviate spiritual and physical misery. Enough for us; abundance for others.

If the people who hurt us have anger or desperation within them then they suffer. When you see that someone suffers, you might be motivated by a desire to help him not to suffer anymore.

To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.

My work as a human being is to quiet my mind, open my heart and do what I can to relieve the suffering with as much wisdom, skill, whatever I got.

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.

Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart. Even if he says things that are full of wrong perceptions, full of bitterness, you are still capable of continuing to listen with compassion. Because you know that listening like that, you give that person a chance to suffer less.

Lord give me this seeing faith, then my work will never be monotonous. I will find joy in humoring the fancies and gratifying the wishes of all poor sufferers. O beloved sick, how doubly dear you are to me, when you personify Christ; and what a privilege is mine to be allowed to tend you.

Who can take away suffering without entering it?

Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.

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

What breaks my heart is suffering of any kind.

I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love, and that in doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.

One very powerful and effective way to work with this tendency to push away pain and hold on to pleasure is the practice of tonglen.  In tonglen practice, when we see or feel suffering, we  breathe in with the notion of completely feeling it, accepting it, and owning it.

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.

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.

No true search for enlightenment ignores the suffering of other sentient beings. Ever. We simply need to create a way to address that suffering while remaining in a blissful center.

I'm the most passionate about pushing the realization that there's the joy of love and kindness and sharing, all of these basic qualities, on people who are suffering from adulthood. By these people, I mean, I really feel bad. I think that in their sadness, they're destroying the world. The way that they're destroying the world manifests itself in all these various causes that you have banding together all over the place.

I begin each day with holy Mass, receiving Jesus hidden under the appearance of a simple piece of bread. Then I go out into the streets and I find the same Jesus hidden in the dying destitute, the AIDS patients, the lepers, the abandoned children, the hungry, and the homeless. It's the same Jesus.

You are all adding to each other's unhappiness; you are all helping each other to be more unhappy. Every single man has many people behind him making him unhappy. If an understanding of compassion is there, then you will change all the ways that you cause unhappiness in others. And if you can bring happiness to someone's life, you will find a way to do it.

When someone you love is hurting, if it was possible, you'd want to take their pain for them. But do I really want cramps and sore boobs?

The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.