#suffering

The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do. ↗

— John Connolly

#suffer #suffering #nature

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security. ↗

— Walter M. Miller Jr.

#perversion #security #suffering #nature

Everyone suffers at least one bad betrayal in their lifetime. It’s what unites us. The trick is not to let it destroy your trust in others when that happens. Don’t let them take that from you. ↗

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

#suffering #trust #trust

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#mourning #sadness #sorrow #suffering #sad

Those who don't know how to suffer are the worst off. There are times when the only correct thing we can do is to bear out troubles until a better day. ↗

— Deng Ming-Dao

#suffering #taoism #harmony

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#contrast #suffering

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#nostalgia #vocabulary #suffering

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer. ↗

— Mark Z. Danielewski

#suffering

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

#empathy #kindness #suffering #understanding-others #suffering

Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied. ↗

— Jane Austen

#histrionics #hysterics #irony #mrs-bennett #suffering