Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.

empathy love suffering

About Dodie Smith

Dorothy Gladys "Dodie" Smith (3 May 1896 – 24 November 1990) was an English novelist and playwright. She is best known for writing I Capture the Castle (1948) and the children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956). Other works include Dear Octopus (1938) and The Starlight Barking (1967). The...

More quotations from Dodie Smith

All I really want to write about is what happened just before he left. But if I let myself start with that I might forget some of the things which came first. And every word he said is of deepest value to me.

—Dodie Smith in I Capture the Castle

It is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to.

—Dodie Smith in I Capture the Castle

optimism morning waking up

I was so happy that I wanted to be kind to everyone in the world.

—Dodie Smith in I Capture the Castle

kindness happiness world

Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return—that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt that I had discovered a great truth.

—Dodie Smith in I Capture the Castle

truth love happiness luxury

More quotations tagged with “suffering”

Without meaning to belittle the wonders of science, I do not think they can absolve mankind of suffering, desire, madness, and death.

—Lewis H. Lapham

science death suffering desire madness

Consider how much more often you suffer from your anger and grief than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved.

—Marcus Antonius

grief suffering anger

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have bought it or baked it or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.

—Daniel Berrigan

hope suffering loss service

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

history privilege morality suffering nobility heroes conflict minority

Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.

suffering worry invention afflictions