66 Quotes On Suffering

Suffering is an intrinsic part of the human experience, a universal thread that weaves through every life, regardless of culture or circumstance. It often challenges us, shapes us, and, perhaps most importantly, teaches us. Across centuries, thinkers, writers, and leaders have offered insights to help us navigate and find meaning in pain. In this curated collection, you will find 66 profound quotes on suffering that shed light on the complexities of this powerful emotion, offering comfort, understanding, and perhaps a new perspective on the trials we face. Let these words resonate with your own experiences and provide solace as you journey through your personal path of understanding and resilience.

1. “When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.” - John Berger

2. “If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.” - Paulo Coelho

3. “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

4. “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” - Michel de Montaigne

5. “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

6. “There is an ancient tribal proverb I once heard in India. It says that before we can see properly we must first shed our tears to clear the way.” - Libba Bray

7. “They say that “time assuages,”— Time never did assuage; An actual suffering strengthens, As sinews do, with age. Time is a test of trouble, But not a remedy. If such it prove, it prove too There was no malady.” - Emily Dickinson

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

9. “Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.” - Dodie Smith

10. “Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment help us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken.” - Paulo Coelho

11. “So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it.” - Herman Melville

12. “The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.” - Victor Hugo

13. “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

14. “When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist.” - Noah Cicero

15. “I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.” - Jodi Picoult

16. “All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.” - Michael Hureaux-Perez

17. “We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.” - Madeleine L'Engle

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. “Injustice in the end produces independence.” - Voltaire

20. “The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.” - Charlotte Brontë

21. “'Shoot the wounded... what we do to people who are the most vulnerable... we 'shoot the wounded.' As if they haven't suffered enough, we add to it by gossiping and treating hurt people like outcasts." ..."I think we killed Ronnie's spirit... Instead of coming alongside her and supporting her through this, I failed her...” - Lynn Dove

22. “Suffering has its place in the scheme of things. It serves a purpose even though the sufferer may be entirely free from the taint of sin... Among the gentlest and sweetest souls are sometimes found those who suffer much. A person that accepts his lot, does his best, loving both God and man, is a success and will experience a joy in living.” - Joseph F. Merrill

23. “I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.” - Dan Barker

24. “Relief is a great feeling.It’s the emotional and physical reward we receive from our bodies upon alleviation of pain, pressure and struggle. A time to bask in the lack of the negative.And yet, think about it—relief is really the status quo, a negation of the suffering, a nothing in itself. It is the way things were before the pressure and struggle began.So, is it a step back? A regression?Or is it an opportunity to regroup, start over, and move in a different direction?Use your moment of relief well.” - Vera Nazarian

25. “He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.” - Elizabeth Goudge

26. “A GUIDED TOUR OF SUFFERING: To your left, perhaps your right, perhaps even straight ahead, you find a small black room. In it sits a Jew. He is scum. He is starving. He is afraid. Please - try not to look away.” - Markus Zusak

27. “Because all my life I've learned to suffer in silence - Athena” - Paulo Coelho

28. “Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.” - Viktor E. Frankl

29. “Easily mistaken, it is not about a love for adversity, it is about knowing a strength and a faith so great that adversity, in all its adverse manifestations, hardly even exists.” - Criss Jami

30. “Ultimately, in the battle against lies and violence, truth and love have no other weapon than the witness of suffering.” - Pope Benedict-XVI

31. “That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution” - Haruki Murakami

32. “Our past may explain why we're suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.” - Joyce Meyer

33. “It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering.” - Jane Austen

34. “One day, when I thought I was alone, I prayed in church. While making this offering before the cross, a parishioner came up to me, put her arm around my shoulder and prayed, ‘Dear God, please heal Father Jim. And give me his cancer.’ I was incredulous. I looked at her, and then back to the Lord and quietly prayed, ‘If she insists, Lord, hear our prayer!’ Later I was able to pray, ‘Lord, rather than give my cancer to her, give her heart of love to me – the love that prompted her to deny her very self and pray in such a loving way.” - Jim Willig

35. “Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.” - John Green

36. “People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...” - Jeannette Walls

37. “I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.” - Stephen King

38. “Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.” - Willa Cather

39. “Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.” - Peter Singer

40. “Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness” - Orhan Pamuk

41. “If you allow it, [suffering] can be the means by which God brings you His greatest blessings.” - Swindoll Charles R.

42. “Encounter Jesus. Suffer with him to experience his life more fully. Be holy in your love for God and his church as God is holy in his love for you and his church. Imagine what awaits those who now walk by faith, when faith and hope give way to the fullness of love when Jesus appears, when faith becomes sight at the consummation of Jesus' union with his people at the marriage supper of the Lamb.” - Paul Louis Metzger

43. “I love you, Lucien, but I am a muse, you are an artist, I am not here to make you comfortable.” - Christopher Moore

44. “Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now.” - Eckhart Tolle

45. “It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy—the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.” - George Eliot

46. “One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” - Schopenhauer, Arthur

47. “…if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it’s a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you’re thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be.” - Tony Kushner

48. “In the end, even the “yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love.” - Pope Benedict-XVI

49. “‎Kalganov ran back into the front hall, sat down in a corner, bent his head, covered his face with his hands, and began to cry. He sat like that and cried for a long time--cried as though he were still a little boy and not a man of twenty... 'What are these people, what sort of people can there be after this!' he kept exclaiming incoherently, in bitter dejection, almost in despair. At that moment he did not even want to live in the world. 'Is it worth it, is it worth it!' the grieved young man kept exclaiming.” - Dostoevsky Feodor Dostoevsky

50. “Everywhere I looked, hope existed - but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. It was a theological concept, not a spiritual practice. Hope, I began to realize, was not a state of life. It was at best a gift of life.” - Joan Chittister

51. “My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render.” - Charlotte Brontë

52. “Whether it's a Christian or a non-Christian, there's nothing like suffering to show us how small, needy, and not in control we are. Suffering has a way of sobering us up to the realization that we can't make it on our own, that we need help, that we're broken.” - Tullian Tchividjian

53. “Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.” - Tozer, A. W.

54. “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

55. “There are people who are destined to taste only the poison in things, for whom any surprise is a painful surprise and any experience a new occasion for torture. if someone were to say to me that such suffering has subjective reasons, related to the individual's particular makeup, i would then ask; is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? who can say with precision that my neighbor suffers more than i do or that jesus suffered more than all of us? there is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes absolute and unlimited. how much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the mostcruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others. because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute.” - Emil Cioran

56. “...it's always somebody's fault - I blame you for my helpless love - do you think I chose this? Your beauty compelled me...” - John Geddes

57. “...it was inevitable I loved you - we were soul mates - for the same reason, we were fated to suffer...” - John Geddes

58. “Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” - Thomas Hardy

59. “Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.” - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

60. “The undisciplined mind confuses misfortune with mistakes.” - Mark Caney

61. “The Weaver”“My life is but a weavingBetween my God and me.I cannot choose the colorsHe weaveth steadily.Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;And I in foolish prideForget He sees the upperAnd I the underside.Not ’til the loom is silentAnd the shuttles cease to flyWill God unroll the canvasAnd reveal the reason why.The dark threads are as needfulIn the weaver’s skillful handAs the threads of gold and silverIn the pattern He has plannedHe knows, He loves, He cares;Nothing this truth can dim.He gives the very best to thoseWho leave the choice to Him.” - Grant Colfax Tullar

62. “She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.” - Dean Koontz

63. “With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y.'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said.'Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.” - John Green

64. “Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ's Cross at the center of that history? . . . But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and--to repeat once again--Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. he is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares man's lot and participates in his destiny.” - Pope John Paul II

65. “I alone knew what I had suffered. I alone knew what it felt like to be alive but dead.” - Phoolan Devi

66. “Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry.” - Yann Martel