“Although social and personal circumstances will play their part in contributing to how an individual suffers, in Buddhist thought blame is seen as a "poison" that will only lead to negative actions and will do nothing to reduce suffering.”

“The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring that person joy.”

“It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.”

“It is easy to suffer for a cause or for a mission; this ennobles the heart of the person suffering. 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.”

“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.”

“The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly, mediated only secondarily by consciousness. Instinctive sexuality is at our core, interfering constantly with the life of the intellect. To be an individual expression of this will is to lead a life of continual desire, deficiency, and suffering. Pleasure or satisfaction exists only relative to a felt lack; it is negative, merely the cessation of an episode of striving or suffering, and has no value of itself. Nothing we can achieve by conscious act of will alters the will to life within us. There is no free will. Human actions, as part of the natural order, are determined [....] As individual parts of the empirical world we are ineluctably pushed through life by a force inside us which is not of our choosing, which gives rise to needs and desires we can never fully satisfy, and is without ultimate purpose. Schopenhauer concludes that it would have been better not to exist—and that the world itself is something whose existence we should deplore rather than celebrate.”