52 Suffering Quotes

In the labyrinth of human experience, suffering emerges as a universal thread that binds us all. Whether it's the pangs of personal loss, the trials of unfulfilled dreams, or the broader struggles of society, suffering is an inescapable part of our journey. Yet, through pain and adversity, we often find profound insights and a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. To honor this complex aspect of life, we've curated a collection of 52 poignant quotes that delve into the essence of suffering. These quotes, drawn from a diverse array of thinkers, writers, and philosophers, offer solace, wisdom, and a reminder that in our darkest moments, we are never truly alone. Join us as we explore these timeless reflections on suffering and find inspiration in the resilience of the human spirit.

1. “When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.” - Yann Martel

2. “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

3. “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” - John Green

4. “One thing you can't hide - is when you're crippled inside.” - John Lennon

5. “Wisdom comes through suffering.Trouble, with its memories of pain,Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,So men against their willLearn to practice moderation.Favours come to us from gods.” - Aeschylus

6. “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” - C.S. Lewis

7. “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

8. “Human is a suffered mind but an enlightened soul.” - Santosh Kalwar

9. “Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.” - Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

10. “Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.” - John le Carré

11. “As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.” - Jack London

12. “We who are like senseless children shrink from suffering, but love its causes. We hurt ourselves; our pain is self-inflicted! Why should others be the object of our anger?” - Shantideva

13. “Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified prepare the soul for glory.” - Richard Sibbes

14. “Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?” - Jodi Picoult

15. “To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

16. “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

17. “The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.” - Melvin Jules Bukiet

18. “Some animal rights activists are demanding vegetarianism, even veganism now, or nothing. But since only 4 or 5 percent of Americans claim to be vegetarians, 'nothing' is the far more likely outcome. I ask these activists to weigh the horrors of Bladen County's industrial farms and the Tar Heel slaughterhouse against the consequences of doing nothing to alleviate the hour-to-hour sufferings of its victims. Is not a life lived off the factory farm and a death humanely inflicted superior to the terrible lives we know they lead and the horrible deaths we know they suffer in Bladen County today?” - Steven Wise

19. “He was without any comforts of God — no feeling that God loved him — nofeeling that God pitied him — no feeling that God supported him. God was hissun before — now that sun became all darkness… He was without God — hewas as if he had no God. All that God had been to him before was taken fromhim now. He was Godless — deprived of his God. He had the feeling of thecondemned, when the Judge says: “Depart from me, ye cursed,” “who shallbe punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord andfrom the glory of his power.” He felt that God said the same to him. Ah! This isthe hell which Christ suffered. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings isunfathomable… He was forsaken in the [place] of sinners. If you close with himas your surety, you will never be forsaken… “My God, my God, why hast thouforsaken me?” [The answer?] For me — for me.” - Robert Murray McCheyne

20. “Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally 'feeling with.' Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort--a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance.” - Melanie Joy

21. “There is no error more absurd, and yet more rooted in the heart of man, than the belief that his sufferings will promote his spiritual safety.” - Charles Robert Maturin

22. “As long as you think that the cause of your problem is “out there”—as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering—the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you’re suffering in paradise.” - Byron Katie

23. “The healing is my working out my salvation. The need constant because my desire for seperateness constantly wrestles with my need for oneness with Jesus. The search for Jesus is bigger, deeper and agonizing.” - W. Scott Lineberry

24. “I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.” - Hermann Hesse

25. “What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

26. “When confronted with suffering that won't go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing,...not on the Master's hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it's just that you're in the middle of a story. If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you... will begin to see the patterns. You'll become a poet, sensitive to your Father's voice.” - Paul E. Miller

27. “My wife and I were present at this congress. Sabina told me, "Richard, stand up and wash away this shame from the face of Christ! They are spitting in His face." I said to her, "If I do so, you lose your husband." She replied, "I don't wish to have a coward as a husband.” - Richard Wurmbrand

28. “In what he suffered, as in all true suffering and in true joy, there was the quality of eternity. He could not believe it would ever end.” - Elizabeth Goudge

29. “Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way” - Barry Unsworth

30. “Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.” - Anna Funder

31. “If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.” - Diane Wood Middlebrook

32. “We rise up And we fall downOnly to rise again” - Karen Hackel

33. “Suffering — how divine it is, how misunderstood! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.” - Anatole France

34. “But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.” - John Green

35. “That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.” - Ann Voskamp

36. “On feeling guilty about lack of 'productivity':"In a time of infirmity, the illness IS one's work. Taking care of all the disciplines that our health problems require IS the other part of the small daily fidelity to which we are called, beside the faithfulness of being attentive to God. We can be well simply by our diligence in being who we are at the moment."--Marva Dawn, Being Well When We're Ill pg 137” - Marva Dawn

37. “But maybe that's how it is with art. You suffer, and in the end, everyone thinks it's cool.” - Tom Dolby

38. “Our torments also may in length of timeBecome our Elements.” - John Milton

39. “God pours out his choicest blessings on those who are anxious that nothing shall stick to their hands. Individuals who value the rainy day above the present agony of the world will get no blessing from God.” - William MacDonald

40. “She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of the insulted and injured, oppressed by destiny, and smarting under the sense of its injustice.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

41. “Maybe awful things is how God speaks to us, Vernon thought, trudging up the lightless tunnel. Maybe folks don’t trust in good things no more. Maybe awful things is all God’s got to remind us he’s alive. Maybe war is God come to life in men. Vernon pushed on toward the light of day. He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer.” - Alan Heathcock

42. “Strong people alone know how to organize their suffering so as to bear only the most necessary pain.” - Emil Dorian

43. “God draws near to the brokenhearted. He leans toward those who are suffering. He knows what it feels like to be wounded and abandoned.” - John D. Richardson

44. “We come to the end of suffering, through suffering.” - T. Scott McLeod

45. “Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.” - Sigmund Freud

46. “A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames No light; but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe” - John Milton

47. “But how to explain suffering because of a man? It's not explainable. With that kind of suffering, a person feels as if they're in hell, because there is no nobility, no greatness - only misery.” - Paulo Coelho

48. “Why are...poor people more ready to share their goods than rich people? The answer is easy: The poor have little to lose; the rich have more to lose and they are more attached to their possessions. Poverty provides a deeper motivation for understanding your neighbors, welcoming others and attending to those who are suffering. I would go so far as to say that poverty helps you understand what happiness is, what serenity is in life.” - Piero Gheddo

49. “Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.” - seneca

50. “As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property – and loathsome as such claim might be, there’s something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No- if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes- if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value, only man’s fight against suffering is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim – is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.” - Ayn Rand

51. “God does not remove us from all harm; He uses harm to move us close to Him.” - Dillon Burroughs

52. “Help me to get my eyes off my suffering and onto you, God.” - Shirley Corder