philosophy of suffering Quotes

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world.

Hold the sadness and pain of samsara [suffering, confusion] in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun [fundamental awake human nature]. Then the warrior [brave enough to look at & work with reality] can make a proper cup of tea.

Suffering well borne is better than suffering removed.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.

There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

Death is not the worst sorrow.

Humans will always endure suffering - even accepting the fact that we're going to die will cause us suffering, and from that stems a little pessimism and negativity that all of us are susceptible to.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.

We mortals with immortal minds are only born for sufferings and joys, and one could almost say that the most excellent receive joy through sufferings.

... the inexorable lesson of centuries: suffering must be borne; there is no way out.

The cure for pain is in the pain. Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both, you don't belong with us.

How can this world, which is so beautiful, include so much horror?

There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is not.

The suffering itself is not so bad; it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.