"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day:

- I shall not fear anyone on Earth.
- I shall fear only God.
- I shall not bear ill will toward anyone.
- I shall not submit to injustice from anyone.
- I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"One thing you can't hide - is when you're crippled inside."
— John Lennon

"Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional."
— Dalai Lama

"Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight."
— Albert Schweitzer

"When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi: A novel)

"If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire."
— Thich Nhat Hanh (The Art of Power)

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is far worse than the suffering itself - and no heart has ever suffered when it’s gone in search of its dreams."
— Paul Coelho

"One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments what we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"To some, the image of a pale body glimmering on a dark night whispers of defeat. What good is a God who does not control his Son's suffering? But another sound can be heard: the shout of a God crying out to human beings, "I LOVE YOU." Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to - because of us. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.


Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross. "
— Philip Yancey

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. "Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

" — This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.
— Who knows it better?
— Yet you believe?
Kumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. There is my wife, and you, my friend, and these people who welcomed me, and the child who is so eager to be with us here in Ndotsheni – so in my suffering I can believe.
— I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.
Kumalo looked at his friend with joy. You are a preacher, he said."
— Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country)

"The point is, Ilsa Hermann had decided to make suffering her triumph. When it refused to let go of her, she succumbed to it. She embraced it. "
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Black Tulip)

"A fragile soul caught in the hands of fate, when morning comes it will be too late
"
— Martina Mcbride

"Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. "
— James Frey (My Friend Leonard)

"
"No matter how much you hate or how much you suffer, you can't bring the dead back to life" Hiko Seijuurou"
— Watsuki Nobuhiro

"If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing."
— Khaled Hosseini

"Suffering in the path of Christian obedience, with joy - because the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life (Psalm 63:3) - is the clearest display of the worth of God in our lives. Therefore, faith-filled suffering is essential in this world for the most intense, authentic worship. When we are most satisfied with God in suffering, he will be most glorified in us in worship. Our problem is not styles of music. Our problem is styles of life. When we embrace more affliction for the worth of Christ, there will be more fruit in the worship of Christ.


"
— John Piper (Tested by Fire)

"Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you"
— Ginnetta Correli

"I think it is very good when people suffer. To me that is like the kiss of Jesus. "
— Mother Teresa

"Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism."
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

""If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer.""
— Davide Deida

"When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together."
— John Berger

"We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer."
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"How can one be well...when one suffers morally?"
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering"
— Albert Camus (The Plague)

"The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do.
"
— John Connolly

"To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life."
— Oscar Wilde (Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Stories)

"Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, real hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today."
— Hermann Hesse

"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence."
— Léon Bloy

"There's a lot of pointing. A festival of pointing and at very close range to other people's eyes, given the width of the space. Also detracting from the exhibit's potential tranquility is the display cabinet of pinned specimens along one wall. I found this disturbing from the start. You don't see a whole lot of stuffed polar bears in the polar bear exhibit at the zoo, for instance. And butterflies have phenomenal vision so it's not like they can't see the mass crucifixion in their midst. I was offended on behalf of the butterflies and thus pleased with my offense. Let the empathizing begin! This volunteering thing was working already. I am a good person, hear me give!"
— Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There'd Be Cake)

"The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being"
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not. "
— C.S. Lewis

"In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"Yea ! by your works are ye justified--toil unrelieved ;
Manifold labours, co-ordinate each to the sending achieved ;
Discipline, not of the feet but the soul, unremitting, unfeigned ;
Tortures unholy by flame and by maiming, known, faced, and disdained ;
Courage that suns
Only foolhardiness ; even by these, are ye worthy of your guns."
— Gilbert Frankau

"The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good.... If God can take the greatest of evils and turn them for the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well."
— Carl R. Trueman

"Suffering with another is typically not pure suffering; there is some good or positive in this experience."
— Louis Hoffman (Existential Psychology East-West)

"The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared i his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art."
— Hermann Bahr

"People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

""It's going to be a hard time; we can count on that. But with all the misery, what opportunities to show mercy and brotherly love in our land, which has sinned so greatly against love. And patience! For now is the time when the victors, in the blind triumph of their victory, are likely to make mistakes. But that's not our concern, for we shall only be the sufferers, not the agents of suffering. What a power for peace will lie in our own powerlessness if we can only glimpse in it the sign of grace!""
— Margot Benary-Isbert (Dangerous Spring)

""Perhaps," you will add, grinning, "those who have never been slapped will also not understand" - thereby politely hinting that I, too, may have experienced a slap in my life, and am therefore speaking as a connoisseur."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)