Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.
-Charles Dickens
"Great Expectations"
Quotations
Suffering
It requires more courage to suffer than to die.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
-William Nicholson
"Shadowlands"
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
-Alan Watts
Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.
-Meister Eckhart "Meister Eckhart"
It's easy to look at people and make quick judgements about them, their present and their pasts, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceburg hidden from sight. And more often then not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.
-Sherrilyn Kenyon
"Acheron"
...when I think of you it's with tears, because no one else has such delicate hands that can reach into my soul and calm my fears...
-John Geddes
"A Familiar Rain"
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
-Hermann Hesse
Behold the man who shields his family from all suffering. Has not his body become a willing vessel for affliction? Without good men to hold it up, the family house will fall when misfortune descends.
-Scriptures "Tirukkural 103:1029-1030"
We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.
-Sigmund Freud
