We all experience suffering in life. Deaths, calamities, challenges, and other life situations cause people to suffer. It may be unavoidable, so the best thing you can do is not to falter, move on, and learn from them. May these quotes about pain and suffering give you insights on how to endure and prevail over the hardships you face that will make you much stronger than the previous you.
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1. “When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.” – Philip Yancey
2. “We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” – Marcel Proust
3. “There are far too many silent sufferers. Not because they don't yearn to reach out, but because they've tried and found no one who cares.” – Richelle E. Goodrich
4. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
5. “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller
6. “Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term, so you can get paid in the long term.” – Naval Ravikant
7. “Our past may explain why we're suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.” – Joyce Meyer
8. “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” – John Green
9. “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” – Kahlil Gibran
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10. “Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.” – Patti Smith
11. “I don’t believe there is pleasure in life. I believe there is only relief of pain. We have to suffer to be on top.” – Georges St-Pierre
12. “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.” – Paulo Coelho
13. “We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.” – Willie Nelson
14. “Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.” – Sam Harris
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15. “We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can evolve in a state of joy and inspiration.” – Joe Dispenza
16. “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” – Michel de Montaigne
17. “For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering.” – Albert Camus
18. “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
19. “We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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20. “If pain doesn't lead to humility, you have wasted your suffering.” – Katerina Stoykova Klemer
21. “A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.” – Byron Katie
22. “Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy.” – Alexandre Dumas
23. “Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.” – Bell Hooks
24. “Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.” – Elder Thaddeus
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25. “Handling our suffering is an art. If we know how to suffer, we suffer much less, and we’re no longer afraid of being overwhelmed by the suffering inside.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
26. “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
27. “A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.” – Janet Fitch
28. “God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with.” – Henry Ward Beecher
29. “Happiness is not a reward; it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment; it is a result.” – Robert Green Ingersoll
30. “It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.” – Natsume Sōseki
More Suffering Quotes
31. “If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
32. “Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our souls, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.” – Paulo Coelho
33. “The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.” – Neal Shusterman
34. “Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.” – William S. Burroughs
35. “The trick to healing from suffering, I think, is deciding that the pain was worth it.” – Aella
36. “To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.” – Oscar Wilde
37. “If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer.” – David Deida
38. “Don't take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.” – Don Miguel Ruiz
39. “Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.” – Terry Tempest Williams
40. “It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.” – Sigmund Freud
41. “People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.” – Edward St. Aubyn
42. “Your suffering needs to be respected. Don't try to ignore the hurt, because it is real. Just let the hurt soften you instead of hardening you. Let the hurt open you instead of closing you. Let the hurt send you looking for those who will accept you instead of hiding from those who reject you.” – Bryant McGill
43. “Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on cliches and stay there, until the spirit dies as well.” – Robert Greene
44. “There are some wounds that one can heal only by deepening them and making them worse.” – Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
45. “Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.” – Tennessee Williams
46. “No matter how much you hate or how much you suffer, you can't bring the dead back to life.” – Watsuki Nobuhiro
47. “I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.” – Marilyn Manson
48. “God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.” – William Nicholson
49. “Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.” – Seneca
50. “Strong people alone know how to organize their suffering so as to bear only the most necessary pain.” – Emil Dorian
51. “Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?” – Pablo Neruda
52. “We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.” – Sharon Salzberg
53. “Suffering is due to our disconnection with the inner soul. Meditation is establishing that connection.” – Amit Ray
54. “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.” – Julian Barnes
55. “I suffer because my interactions with others do not meet the expectations I did not know I had.” – Jim McDonald
56. “The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.” – C.S. Lewis
57. “It takes great courage to open one's heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world.” – Vincent A. Gallagher
58. “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.” – Franz Kafka
59. “If I could talk to my younger self, I would just say that the path to great things is filled with a lot of stumbles, suffering, and challenges along the way. But if you have the right attitude and know that hard times will pass, and you get up each time - you will reach your destination.” – Jonny Kim
60. “The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered until you experience it properly and fully the first time.” – Ben Okri
61. “We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.” – Pema Chödrön
62. “It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.” – H.G. Wells
63. “Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.” – Dodie Smith
64. “Sometimes it takes great suffering to pierce the soul and open it up to greatness.” – Jocelyn Murray
65. “If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.” – Khaled Hosseini
66. “We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.” – Bell Hooks
67. “To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature's ladder.” – Rick Yancey
68. “Suffering is one of life's great teachers.” – Bryant H. McGill
69. “The reward of suffering is experience.” – Harry S Truman
70. “Never stop just because you feel defeated. The journey to the other side is attainable only after great suffering.” – Santosh Kalwar
Share these Suffering Quotes about Life with your friends, family, and loved ones to inspire them as well.
2. “We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” – Marcel Proust
3. “There are far too many silent sufferers. Not because they don't yearn to reach out, but because they've tried and found no one who cares.” – Richelle E. Goodrich
4. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
5. “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller
6. “Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term, so you can get paid in the long term.” – Naval Ravikant
7. “Our past may explain why we're suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.” – Joyce Meyer
8. “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” – John Green
9. “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” – Kahlil Gibran
11. “I don’t believe there is pleasure in life. I believe there is only relief of pain. We have to suffer to be on top.” – Georges St-Pierre
12. “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.” – Paulo Coelho
13. “We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.” – Willie Nelson
14. “Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.” – Sam Harris
16. “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” – Michel de Montaigne
17. “For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering.” – Albert Camus
18. “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
19. “We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
21. “A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.” – Byron Katie
22. “Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy.” – Alexandre Dumas
23. “Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.” – Bell Hooks
24. “Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.” – Elder Thaddeus
26. “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
27. “A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.” – Janet Fitch
28. “God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with.” – Henry Ward Beecher
29. “Happiness is not a reward; it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment; it is a result.” – Robert Green Ingersoll
30. “It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.” – Natsume Sōseki
More Suffering Quotes
31. “If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
32. “Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our souls, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.” – Paulo Coelho
33. “The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.” – Neal Shusterman
34. “Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.” – William S. Burroughs
35. “The trick to healing from suffering, I think, is deciding that the pain was worth it.” – Aella
36. “To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.” – Oscar Wilde
37. “If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer.” – David Deida
38. “Don't take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.” – Don Miguel Ruiz
39. “Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.” – Terry Tempest Williams
40. “It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.” – Sigmund Freud
41. “People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.” – Edward St. Aubyn
42. “Your suffering needs to be respected. Don't try to ignore the hurt, because it is real. Just let the hurt soften you instead of hardening you. Let the hurt open you instead of closing you. Let the hurt send you looking for those who will accept you instead of hiding from those who reject you.” – Bryant McGill
43. “Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on cliches and stay there, until the spirit dies as well.” – Robert Greene
44. “There are some wounds that one can heal only by deepening them and making them worse.” – Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
45. “Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.” – Tennessee Williams
46. “No matter how much you hate or how much you suffer, you can't bring the dead back to life.” – Watsuki Nobuhiro
47. “I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.” – Marilyn Manson
48. “God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.” – William Nicholson
49. “Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.” – Seneca
50. “Strong people alone know how to organize their suffering so as to bear only the most necessary pain.” – Emil Dorian
51. “Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?” – Pablo Neruda
52. “We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.” – Sharon Salzberg
53. “Suffering is due to our disconnection with the inner soul. Meditation is establishing that connection.” – Amit Ray
54. “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.” – Julian Barnes
55. “I suffer because my interactions with others do not meet the expectations I did not know I had.” – Jim McDonald
56. “The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.” – C.S. Lewis
57. “It takes great courage to open one's heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world.” – Vincent A. Gallagher
58. “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.” – Franz Kafka
59. “If I could talk to my younger self, I would just say that the path to great things is filled with a lot of stumbles, suffering, and challenges along the way. But if you have the right attitude and know that hard times will pass, and you get up each time - you will reach your destination.” – Jonny Kim
60. “The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered until you experience it properly and fully the first time.” – Ben Okri
61. “We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.” – Pema Chödrön
62. “It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.” – H.G. Wells
63. “Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.” – Dodie Smith
64. “Sometimes it takes great suffering to pierce the soul and open it up to greatness.” – Jocelyn Murray
65. “If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.” – Khaled Hosseini
66. “We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.” – Bell Hooks
67. “To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature's ladder.” – Rick Yancey
68. “Suffering is one of life's great teachers.” – Bryant H. McGill
69. “The reward of suffering is experience.” – Harry S Truman
70. “Never stop just because you feel defeated. The journey to the other side is attainable only after great suffering.” – Santosh Kalwar
Share these Suffering Quotes about Life with your friends, family, and loved ones to inspire them as well.