Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of nonresistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in selfsuffering.
I am the source of my own suffering, because of the habits of my mind.
If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, then you are probably creating suffering for others too
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.
Normally, the thin-skinned have an endless array of excuses for why their workaday interactions are so much harder to bear for them than for the rest of us. In the eyes of the self-suffering, they are being victimised, used and always abused, when they're actually experiencing exactly the same body blows as the rest of us.
In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered, in the earliest stages, that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For, what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of Truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but one's own self.
Patience means self-suffering.
O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy.
You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.
The quest of Truth involves tapas-self-suffering-sometimes even unto death.
Love can never express itself by imposing sufferings on others. It can only express itself by self-suffering, by self-purification.
My method is conversion, not coercion, it is self-suffering, not the suffering of the tyrant. I know that method to be infallible.
The function of violence is to obtain reform by external means, the function of passive resistance, that is, soul-force, is to obtain it by growth from within, which, in its turn, is obtained by self-suffering, self-purification.
The greatest source of unhappiness comes from inside.
Nanda broke down every barrier and won his way to freedom not by brag, not by bluster, but by the purest form of self-suffering.
We can never flee the misery that is within us.
To the extent we are perceiving anyone's guilt -choosing to focus on the errors of their personality rather than the eternal innocence of their spirit - we're closing our hearts, deflecting a miracle and causing our own inevitable suffering.
Fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self created suffering comes to an end.
