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People have so much pain inside them that they're not even aware of. (Marina Abramovic)
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool. (Chinua Achebe)
I learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured. (Dean G. Acheson)
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday. (Theodor W. Adorno)
The reward of suffering is experience. (Aeschylus)
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering. (Henri-Frederic Amiel)
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you. (Maya Angelou)
-A Slice Of Snow: A Book Of Poems...
Do not be sad that you have suffered; be glad that you have lived. (Joan Walsh Anglund)
Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain. (Aristotle)
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering. (Jane Austen)
Suffering is essential for the elimination of the ego, just as it was necessary for you to scrub and scrub in order to wash the stain from my coat. (Meher Baba)
- The Anthologist...
You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering. (Nicholson Baker)
- artist and physician during the Iran/Iraq war...
Everyday hundreds of people came to the hospital... dying, and I have to introduce life into them again... my duty was to compete with death. (Ala Bashir)
If we would really feel, the pain would be so great that we would stop all the suffering. (Julian Beck)
Readjusting is a painful process, but most of us need it at one time or another. (Arthur Christopher Benson)
When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful. (Barbara Bloom)
I play a CD and when the music stops the painting is supposed to be finished. But if it isn't finished I throw myself on the floor... sometimes I will play the same CD over and over again until I'm finished. Because suffering is compulsory with painting if you must, and I must. (Chris Bolmeier)
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it. (Hal Borland)
As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue. (Christian Nestell Bovee)
There has never been a great athlete who died not knowing what pain is. (Bill Bradley)
Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
The same refinement which brings us new pleasures exposes us to new pains. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
It is said that in some countries trees will grow, but will bear no fruit because there is no winter there. (John Bunyan)
When we cling to pain we end up punishing ourselves. (Leo Buscaglia)
The significant element that is common to Rivera, Siqueros, Picasso, Pollock, Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo is the expression of pain. (Bill Cannon)
Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men. (Thomas Carlyle)
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. (Alexis Carrel)
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. (M. Kathleen Casey)
-Journey to the End of the Night...
That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying. (Louis-Ferdinand Celine)
The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers. (Deepak Chopra)
We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival. (Winston Churchill)
A man will give up almost anything except his suffering. (John Cleese)
- Act IV of Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare, 1607...
All strange and terrible events are welcome, / but comforts we despise; our size of sorrow, / Proportion'd to our cause, must be as great. (Cleopatra)
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream. (Paulo Coelho)
Is suffering so very serious? ...I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful... hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain... is no more worthy of respect than old age or illness. (Sidonie Gabrielle Colette)
There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with. (Harry Crews)
Suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life, and continue chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, no matter what happens. How could this be anything other than the boundless joy of the Law? (Nichiren Daishonin)
Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise. (Ram Dass)
Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us. (Ram Dass)
Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves. (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
I have never been able to carry out any work coolly. On the contrary it is done, so to speak, with my own blood. (Jim Dine)
Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning. (Benjamin Disraeli)
Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. (John Donne)
Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle. (Will Durant)
Attachment to being right creates suffering.
When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear. (Dr. Wayne Dyer)
Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Beneath its breath souls develop. (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)
-The Virgin Suicides...
Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. (Jeffrey Eugenides)
I thought I alone suffered, / but suffering is everywhere. / When I went on the housetop / I saw its fire in every home. (Farid)
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything. (William Faulkner)
Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse this law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper's scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain. (Federico Fellini)
The most important actions are never comfortable. (Timothy Ferriss)
What is to give light must endure burning. (Viktor Frankl)
In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning. (Viktor Frankl)
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies. (Erich Fromm)
I am a great artist and I know it. The reason I am great is because of all the suffering I have done. (Paul Gauguin)
Great artists suffer for the people. (Marvin Gaye)
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain... Accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields... (Kahlil Gibran)
Many times I see you as a portrait of torture. (Ira Glass)
A great artist... must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Aromatic plants bestow no spicy fragrance while they grow; but crush'd or trodden to the ground, diffuse their balmy sweets around. (Oliver Goldsmith)
You've got to take the bitter with the sour. (Samuel Goldwyn)
-Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, 1742...
To each his suff'rings: all are men, / Condemn'd alike to groan, / The tender for another's pain; / Th' unfeeling for his own. (Thomas Gray)
I suffer for my art and despise the witless moneyed scoundrels who praise it. (El Greco)
Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it's worth. (John Green)
The shadow is both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it. (Liz Green)
We forget very easily what gives us pain. (Henry Graham Greene)
Painting is nothing more than bleeding on the canvas. (Andrew Hamilton)
There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound. (Thomas Hardy)
Perhaps for some people, in order to first find their passion they need to suffer, just to uncover what is of prime importance, and then the suffering itself can create emotional energy i.e. passion, which then fuels their work. (Margot Hattingh)
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 artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl. (Heinrich Heine)
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it - don't cheat with it. (Ernest Hemingway)
Everyone suffers wrongs for which there is no remedy. (Edgar Watson Howe)
How can anyone not respect the strength, the 'heartiness' of a leaning tree that grows out of a rock? (Melissa Jean)
Without pain there would be no suffering. Without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. (Angelina Jolie)
Untold suffering seldom is. (Franklin P. Jones)
There is no birth of consciousness without pain. (Carl Gustav Jung)
Many suffer the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds. (Juvenal)
Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive. (Franz Kafka)
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid. (Franz Kafka)
My painting carries with it the message of pain. (Frida Kahlo)
The artist is not a 'Sunday child' for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear. (Wassily Kandinsky)
The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want. (Byron Katie)
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved. (Helen Keller)
You make yourself and others suffer just as much when you take offense as when you give offense. (Ken S. Keyes Jr.)
God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live. (Stephen King)
While I drew, and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the suffering of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high. (Kathe Kollwitz)
We are greater than our suffering. (Reem Kubaa)
I fight pain, anxiety and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live. (Yayoi Kusama)
A true direction will come from overcoming adversity. Everyone - think deeply, fight harder and obtain splendid direction for your life. I wish for you to gain guidance from your deep thinking and spread your ideas all over the world in order to establish a wonderful life and world. I think that it is very important. Let's fight together for it. It is my strongest wish as an artist. (Yayoi Kusama)
I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. (Dalai Lama)
To a large extent, whether you suffer depends on how you respond to a given situation. (Dalai Lama)
-in a letter to Catherine Carswell, 1916...
I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one's whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured. (D. H. Lawrence)
Know how sublime a thing it is / To suffer and be strong. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
It has done me good to be somewhat parched by the heat and drenched by the rain of life. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
To render ourselves insensible to pain we must forfeit also the possibilities of happiness. (John Lubbock)
Whatever pain and suffering you've experienced in your life has been a blessing at least in this one regard: you now know some true things that you couldn't have learned any other way. (Eric Maisel)
Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for. (Bob Marley)
Everyone faces the challenge of finding meaning to their suffering. (Phil McGraw)
When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one. (Mignon McLaughlin)
A new wound makes all the old ones ache again. (Mignon McLaughlin)
All suffering comes from a person's inability to sit still and be alone. (Anthony de Mello)
There is nothing the body suffers the soul may not profit by. (George Meredith)
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. (Thomas Merton)
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. (Kenji Miyazawa)
Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it. (Navarre Scott Momaday)
- at Giverny, January 15, 1915...
I sometimes feel ashamed that I am devoting myself to artistic pursuits while so many of our people are suffering and dying for us. It's true that fretting never did any good. (Claude Monet)
Work is nearly always a torture. If I could find something else I would be much happier, because I could use this other interest as a form of relaxation. Now I cannot relax. (Claude Monet)
Those who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths and the natures which enjoy most keenly are those which also suffer most sharply. (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
Pain nourishes courage. You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you. (Mary Tyler Moore)
Pain and adversity reveal who we really are. (Stephen Morris)
Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. (Jim Morrison)
They will not get it into their heads that these paintings were created in all seriousness and in suffering, that they are the products of sleepless nights, that they have cost me blood and weakened my nerves. (Edvard Munch)
I cannot help it - in spite of myself, infinity torments me. (Alfred de Musset)
Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who's never waited for anyone? (Pablo Neruda)
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
That which does not kill us makes us stronger. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The weariest night, the longest days, sooner or later must perforce come to an end. (Baroness Orczy)
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. (George Orwell)
Bear and endure: This sorrow will one day prove to be for your good. (Ovid)
-The Road Less Traveled...
To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth. (M. Scott Peck)
Pain is meant to wake us up... Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. (Fritz Perls)
-The Book of Disquiet...
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful. (Fernando Pessoa)
For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain. (Fernando Pessoa)
We all suffer, even though we've got degrees, we teach, we write, we have literary magazines. (Judy Pfaff)
I used to hurt so badly that I'd ask God why, what have I done to deserve any of this? I feel now He was preparing me for this, for the future. That's the way I see it. (Eden Phillpotts)
Any painful experience makes you see things differently. It also reminds you of the simple truths that we purposely forget every day or else we would never get out of bed. (Amy Poehler)
The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt. (Steven Pressfield)
-The War of Art
The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. (Steven Pressfield)
No one knows where the shoe pinches, but he who wears it. (Latin proverb)
What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art. (Odilon Redon)
To grasp at something permanent is the very source of suffering. To push something away takes more energy than to accept its presence. (Peter Renner)
-explaining why he still painted when his hands were twisted with arthritis...
The pain passes, but the beauty remains. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)
The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you. (Tony Robbins)
We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment. (Jim Rohn)
The creative process seems indelibly linked to struggle and strife. The world believes artists by nature are meant to suffer. (Rick Rotante)
It's amazing how much punishment we can take. (Philip Roth)
The happiest is the person who suffers the least pain; most miserable the ones who enjoy the least pleasure. (Henri Rousseau)
Burdens are the foundations of ease and bitter things the forerunners of pleasure. (Rumi)
The cure for pain is in the pain. (Rumi)
Ah, to think how thin the veil that lies Between the pain of hell and Paradise. (George William Russell)
You will not be carried to Heaven lying at ease upon a feather bed. (Samuel Rutherford)
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
One cannot get through life without pain... What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us. (Bernie S. Siegal)
Don't hide your scars. They make you who you are. (Frank Sinatra)
The cause of our suffering is not what we do, but the way we perceive. (Rodney Smith)
One can find so many pains when the rain is falling. (John Steinbeck)
The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. (William Styron)
Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink. (William Styron)
People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved. (Anne Sullivan)
The dramatic sufferings of adults and all the cruel fantasies of those of my own age, who seemed abandoned to their own impulses in the midst of so many catastrophes, appeared to inscribe themselves on the walls around me. (Antoni Tapies)
Pain is never permanent. (Saint Teresa of Avila)
In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel. (Saint Teresa of Avila)
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of the pain we all have. (Lionel Trilling)
Dear Child of God, I am sorry to say that suffering is not optional. (Desmond Tutu)
O you who have borne even heavier things, God will grant an end to these too. (Virgil)
Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth. (Alice Walker)
If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else. (Simone Weil)
-Harry Lime in the film The Third Man, 1949...
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce...? The cuckoo clock. (Orson Welles)
You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth. (Cornel West)
Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering. (Margaret J. Wheatley)
Misfortunes one can endure. But to suffer for one's own faults – ah! – there is the sting of life. (Oscar Wilde)
To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. (Oscar Wilde)
Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead. (Tennessee Williams)
You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria. (Naomi Wolf)
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. (William Wordsworth)
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark / And shares the nature of infinity. (William Wordsworth)
Personality is born out of pain. It is the fire shut up in the flint. (Jack B. Yeats)
I view all art as an effort to translate brain concepts into a work. These brain concepts are synthetic ones - the result of many experiences. But a single work of art, or even a series of works, more often than not cannot translate these synthetic concepts adequately. Yves Saint Laurent once said (I think to Christian Lacroix) that he suffered greatly when creating. He is not alone in that. Most artists do the same and say as much. (Semir Zeki)
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