I've never been very good at feasting on the daily newspaper. It turns bitter in my mouth. And yet, this is my world. This face of suffering I must embrace as a part of my responsibility. Part of the feast is becoming aware of the world that is mine. Part of the feast is owning this broken world as my own brokenness.
—Macrina Wiederkehr
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
—Eleanor Roosevelt
People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous. They seem to think life owes them something. I’ve known many who have suffered worse and been cut off from life much more…and they’ve managed to lead happy contented lives. It’s what’s in yourself that makes you happy or unhappy.
—Agatha Christie in A Murder Is Announced
We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
—Anna Sewell
Love is suffering. One side always loves more.
—Catherine Deneuve
Even for our enemies in misery, there should be tears in our eyes.
—Charan Singh
Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind. . . . In the process of discovering our true nature, the journey goes down, not up. . . . Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. . . . We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we will let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of compassion. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.
—Pema Chödrön
It is the people who have no say in making wars who suffer most from the consequences of them.
—Philippa Carr
Jews and blacks come from the same history. . . . We've just expressed our suffering differently as people. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complain; we just never thought of putting it to music.
—Jon Stewart
No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is.
—Isaac Rosenfeld
The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.
—May Sarton
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other. A patient once told me that he had tried to ignore his own suffering and the suffering of other people because he had wanted to be happy. Yet becoming numb to suffering will not make us happy. The part in us that feels suffering is the same as the part that feels joy.
—Rachel Naomi Remen
Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.
—Jose Marti
What is a minority? The chosen heroes of this earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy today that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have stood in the vanguard of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.
—John B. Gough