Self-Inflicted Suffering Quotes

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

The tyranny we impose on others, we will eventually impose on ourselves.

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

No man is hurt but by himself.

But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am my own executioner.

Being angry is like picking up a knife with no handle: it is self-harming.

The violence done us by others is often less painful than that which we do to ourselves.

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.

We are really the victims of our own problems.

That is the bitterest of all,--to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.

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

It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

And what shall he suffer who slays him who of all men, as they say, is his own best friend? I mean the suicide, who deprives himself by violence of his appointed share of life. Not because the law of the state requires him. Nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune which has come upon him. Nor because he has had to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty.

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

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

We suffer from the evils which we, by our own free will, inflict on ourselves and ascribe them to God, who is far from being connected with them!

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

If through your vices you afflicted are, Lay not the blame of your distress on God; You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards, So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod.

Know for certain that there is no power in the universe to injure us unless we first injure ourselves.

We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.

If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, then you are probably creating suffering for others too

No person or thing hurting you is worth you hurting yourself