#suffering

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains. ↗

— Criss Jami

#adversity #artist #craftiness #craftsmanship #crafty

God will never disappoint us… If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline. …To the unbeliever the fact of suffering only convinces him that God is not to be trusted, does not love us. To the believer, the opposite is true. ↗

— Elisabeth Elliot

#goodness #pain #suffering #trust #love

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157) ↗

— Stephen Batchelor

#empathy #love #suffering #love

The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can't. I don't know what to say. I'm lost in all this sadness, and so are they. ↗

— Ashly Lorenzana

#pain #poetry #poetry-quotes #sadness #suffering

would say that our patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful. Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it. ↗

— Viktor Frankl

#meaning #suffering #existentialism

There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always - always - returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#hatred #obedience #religion #searching #suffering

In the end, even the “yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love. ↗

— Pope Benedict XVI

#selfishness #suffering #love

To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#suffering #the-cross #death

Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve. ↗

— Thorton Wilder

#love #suffering #woundedhealer #love

To you I speak with much hesitation about suffering. . . . But there is an introduction to suffering which comes with the birthpains of Love. And in such suffering one finds for the first time how deep and profound is the nature and meaning of life. And in such suffering one sees, as if one’s eye were newly opened upon a blinding light, . . . And there too is suffering, but there, above all, is peace and victory. ↗

— Thomas Kelly

#life