#suffering

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

#helping-others #mental-illness #relating #self-disclosure #suffering

She said, 'It's not life or death, the labyrinth.' 'Um, okay. So what is it?' 'Suffering,' she said. 'Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?...Nothing's wrong. 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'st the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about. ↗

— John Green

#labyrinth #philosophy #pudge #suffering #death

God has chosen to save the world through the cross, through the shameful and powerless death of the crucified Messiah. If that shocking event is the revelation of the deepest truth about the character of God, then our whole way of seeing the world is turned upside down… all values are transformed… God refuses to play games of power and prestige on human terms. ↗

— Richard Hays

#god #power #suffering #weakness #death

Life is happiness, life is death; we are born, we grow old, and we die. There is nothing is wrong with the cycle of life, our time on earth had a limit set at the very moment we were born. ↗

— Martin Suarez

#birth #clinging #dying #life #life-and-death

We all suffer from dreams ↗

— Bernard Cornwell

#false-hope #illusions #suffering #death

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

#auschwitz #man #suffering #true-colors #design

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

#suffering #dreams

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, “What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage; the certainty that you wasted your life. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#risks #suffering #wasted #dreams

Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#suffering #freedom

I loathe, detest, hate and abominate the block, the gibbet, the rack, the pillory and the faggots with equal passion," said the old man vehemently. "Not only are they devilishly cruel but they are not even common sense. They do not lesson the evil in the world, they increase it, by making those who handle these cruelties as wicked as those who suffer them. No, I'm wrong, more wicked, for there is always some expiation made in the endurance of suffering and none at all in the infliction of it. ↗

— Elizabeth Goudge

#suffering #wickedness #equality