Pain and Suffering Quotes
The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. --C.S. Lewis
A newborn child has to cry, for only in this way will his lungs expand. A doctor once told me of a child who could not breathe when it was born. In order to make it breathe the doctor gave it a slight blow. The mother must have thought the doctor cruel. But he was really doing the kindest thing possible. As with newborn children the lungs are contracted, so are our spiritual lungs. But through suffering God strikes us in love. Then our lungs expand and we can breathe and pray. --Sadhu Sundar Singh
If you suffer, thank God! -- it is a sure sign that you are alive. --Elbert Hubbard
It is not a question of God allowing or not allowing things to happen. It is part of living. Some things we do to ourselves, other things we do to each other. Our Father knows about every bird which falls to the ground, but He does not always prevent it from falling. What are we to learn from this? That our response to what happens is more important than what happens. Here is a mystery: one man’s experience drives him to curse God, while another man’s identical experience drives him to bless God. Your response to what happens is more important than what happens. –Chip Brogden
Adversity introduces a man to himself. --Unknown
We all know people who have been made much meaner and more irritable and more intolerable to live with by suffering: it is not right to say that all suffering perfects. It only perfects one type of person ...... the one who accepts the call of God in Christ Jesus. --Oswald Chambers
I say that trials and tests locate a person. In other words they determine where you are spiritually. They reveal the true condition of your heart. How you react under pressure is how the real you reacts.-- John Bevere
Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you respond to it.—Unknown
There has been much tragedy in my life; at least half of it actually happened.-- Mark Twain
The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty. --Stevie Wonder
Bless a thing and it will bless you. Curse it and it will curse you...If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it. --Emmet Fox
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape. --Charles Dickens
Blessings alone do not open our eyes. Indeed, blessings by themselves tend to close our eyes. We do not come to know Him in the blessing, but in the breaking. --Chip Brogden
Most people are far more prone to let the bad experiences shape their views than the good ones. --Rick Joyner
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive. --W. Somerset Maugham
Must you continue to be your own cross? No matter which way God leads you, you change everything into bitterness by constantly brooding over everything. For the love of God, replace all this self-scrutiny with a pure and simple glance at God's goodness. --Saint Jeanne Chantal
We say, then, to anyone who is under trial, give Him time to steep the soul in His eternal truth. Go into the open air, look up into the depths of the sky, or out upon the wideness of the sea, or on the strength of the hills that is His also; or, if bound in the body, go forth in the spirit; spirit is not bound. Give Him time and, as surely as dawn follows night, there will break upon the heart a sense of certainty that cannot be shaken. --Amy Carmichael
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. --Anne Frank
Our problems are opportunities to discover God’s solutions. –Unknown
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. --Thomas Merton
Far too often, however, we resent and resist any interference on God's part that might deprive us of our deepest desires. Many Christians who sing, 'It is well with my soul,' are lying. It is not well with their souls because they are not persevering, and they have no intention of doing so, because they are bitter and hostile toward God and mourn over their 'victimization' at His hands. Others are little better, for they 'persevere' with a cold, stony, stoic demeanor that constantly reminds God how much they are doing for Him despite His lack of reciprocity.--Jim Owen
My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not now either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening towards active assistance, is simply bad. --C.S. Lewis
Depression is rage spread thin. –Paul Tillich
Self pity comes when you lose the intimacy with Jesus. --Stefan Salmonsson
The world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it. --Helen Keller
The only cure for grief is action. -- George Henry Lewes
In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world. --Jesus Christ
It is a sad thing when you hear Christians with a groan in them. When I meet the groaner, I say in my heart, “God, move that man on into the place where he comprehends what Christianity is.” --John G. Lake
If thou art willing to suffer no adversity, how wilt thou be the friend of Christ? --Thomas à Kempis
God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars. -- Elbert Hubbard
Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.—Unknown
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust. -- Samuel Johnson
You may never know that JESUS is all you need, until JESUS is all you have. --Corrie Ten Boom
Do not, I beseech you be troubled by the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistake the hour of the night: it is already morning. --G.K. Chesterson
Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys. -- Alphonse de Lamartine
Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content. –Bob Dylan
Dreams and anguish bring us together. -- Eugene Ionesco
The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. -- Simone Weil
It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one's own sensitivity with the suffering of one's fellow human beings. --Rollo May
Life's unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves. --Hubert Humphrey
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. -- Helen Keller
Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. -- George Eliot
It is through much tribulation that we enter the kingdom of Heaven. --The Apostle Paul
Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever. -- Isak Dinesen
If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him is a service he doesn't appreciate. Maybe – all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary -- evil is where we meet God. Maybe he isn't bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation. Maybe -- just maybe -- if we ever solved the problem, we'd have talked ourselves out of a lover. --Robert Farrar Capon
My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.— Japanese poet Masahide
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.-- Albert Camus
As cold as everything looks in winter, the sun has not forsaken us. He has only drawn away for a little, for good reasons, one of which is that we may learn that we cannot do without him. --George MacDonald
No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. --Bram Stoker
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? --Kahlil Gibran
The breaking of the alabaster box and the anointing of the Lord filled the house with the odor, with the sweetest odor. Everyone could smell it. Whenever you meet someone who has really suffered; been limited, gone through things for the Lord, willing to be imprisoned by the Lord, just being satisfied with Him and nothing else, immediately you scent the fragrance. There is a savor of the Lord. Something has been crushed, something has been broken, and there is a resulting odor of sweetness. --Watchman Nee
The will of God is never exactly what you expect it to be. It may seem to be much worse, but in the end it's going to be a lot better and a lot bigger. --Elisabeth Elliot
Pain is never permanent. --Teresa of Avila
"If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete."
Viktor Frankl,
Man’s Search for Meaning
"As long as one can suffer, one is living....live and suffer until life is gone."
Betty Smith,
Maggie-Now
"...the face of destiny or luck or God that gives us war also gives other kinds of pain: the loss of health and youth, the loss of loved ones, the fear that we will end our days alone. Some people suffer in peace the way others suffer in war. The special gift of that suffering...is how to be strong while we are weak, how to be brave when we are afraid, how to be wise in the mist of confusion, and how to let go of that which we can no longer hold. In this way, anger can teach forgiveness, hate can teach us love, and war can teach us peace."
Le Ly Hayslip,
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
"Not a day passes over the earth but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows." Charles Reade, The Cloister and the Hearth
"I walked a mile with Pleasure
She chattered all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow
And ne'er a word said she;
But oh, the things I learned from her
When Sorrow walked with me."
Robert Browning Hamilton