I do not desire suffering;
yet fool I am, I desire the cause of suffering!
-Shantideva
Your suffering's taste comes forth in you.
Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted.
No one will ever talk you out of it.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
What causes mental suffering
is not the environment but the mind itself.
-Muso Kokushi
All physical and mental sufferings
come by identification, imagination
and wrong human habits of thinking.
-Yogananda
The dissatisfied nature of the nature of the mind itself is suffering.
No matter how much of something you get
it never satisfies you desire for better or more.
This unceasing desire is suffering; its nature is emotional frustration.
-Lama TubtenYeshe
Suffering is pain caused by wrong viewpoints
towards persons or situations or things.
-Rebecca Clark
Our sufferings are just,
and are entirely the result
of our own ignorance, error, and wrongdoing.
-James Allen
The source of human suffering
is that everyone chooses one side
and refuses to see the other side.
-Liou Kia-Hway
Suffering in the world is caused by clinging
to erroneous concepts about self and phenomenon.
-Chogyam Trungpa
Every form of suffering
comes from the violation of some law in life.
-Christian Larson
All the frictions, all the uncertainties,
all the ills, the sufferings, the fears,
the forebodings, the perplexities of life
come to us because we are out of harmony
with the divine order of things...
So long as there a violation of laws,
so long disease and suffering will result.
-Ralph Waldo Trine
Suffering is always a warning.
So much the worse for him who does not understand it!
When Nature tightens the rein, it is that we are swerving;
when she plies the whip, it is that danger is imminent.
Woe, then, to him who does not reflect!
-Eliphas Levi
All undelight, all pain and suffering
are a sign of imperfection, or incompleteness;
they arise from a division of being,
an incompleteness of consciousness of being,
and incompleteness of the force of being.
-Aurobindo Ghose
Suffering is caused by dualism and fragmentation:
it is healed by integration and wholeness.
-Catilin Matthews
The greatest suffering in the human form
is that we are not seen as already perfect and divine.
-Devrah Levine
All human suffering is ultimately traceable
to our estrangement from the self,
the inmost centre of existence.
-Haridas Chaudhuri
We suffer because we are living at a distance from our depths -
it is as simple as that.
-Sandra Maitri
Suffering is a sign that you are out of touch with the truth.
If you are suffering you are asleep.
Do you want a sign that you are asleep?
Here it is: You're suffering.
-Anthony de Mello
We suffer not because things are impermanent
but because we believe they should not be.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
but because we believe they should not be.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting;
it is a sign of unwillingness to move on,
to flow with life.
-Nisargadatta
Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately,
attached to suffering - that is a fact.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
There is something in us which likes suffering
and clings to it for the sake of the drama.
-Aurobindo Ghose
For valuing your own suffering sets on it
the gold of a sun of pride.
-Fernando Pessoa
There are two kinds of suffering.
There is the suffering you run away from,
which follows you everywhere.
And there is the suffering you face directly,
and in doing so become free.
-Ajahn Chah
A man who fears suffering
is already suffering from what he fears.
-Michel de Montaigne
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.
The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end,
the one who suffers most.
-Thomas Merton
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering
is worse than the suffering itself.
-Paulo Coelho
The resistance to the unpleasant situation
is the root of suffering.
-Richard Alpert, "Ram Dass"
We often suffer because we do not understand.
Many conditions and many people are difficult to tolerate,
but once we understand them we can tolerate most anything.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
The cause of all our sufferings
is in ourselves alone,
not outside.
-Ramana Maharshi
You suffer from yourself alone;
no one compels you.
-Gautama Buddha
I say unto you
that suffering is not holding you,
you are holding suffering.
-Chandra Mohan Jain, "Osho"
People have a hard time letting go of their suffering.
Out of the fear of the unknown they prefer suffering that is familiar.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
As you look at many people's lives,
you see that their suffering is in a way gratifying,
for they are comfortable in it.
They make their lives a living hell, but a familiar one.
-Richard Alpert, "Ram Dass"
We humans, not God,
create pain and suffering.
-Mother Teresa
Spiritual suffering is a contradiction in term-symbols;
spirit does not suffer;
suffering is not spiritual.
-Sunyata
There is no virtue in suffering.
In itself, suffering has no value or reward.
-Vernon Howard
Suffering isn't ennobling,
recovery is.
-Christiaan Barnard
Mind activity feeds on itself
until it creates an enormous complexity of suffering.
-Merle Antoinette Roberson (Toni), "Gangaji"
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
-Roland Barthes
As long as you identify yourself with the body-mind,
you are vulnerable to sorrow and suffering.
-Nisargadatta
The deeper your involvement here,
the harsher your pain and suffering.
-Abu Sa'id
Why do we suffer?
Because ninety-nine percent of what we do is for the self,
and there isn't one.
-Wei Wu Wei
If you go toward suffering
and allow yourself to go through it,
you discover suffering is joy,
It's a little itch on the edge of bliss.
-Robert Thurman
You must learn to sacrifice suffering.
-George Gurdjieff
Suffering ceases to become suffering
at the moment it finds a meaning.
-Viktor Frankl
To become the spectator of one's own life
is to escape the suffering of life.
-Oscar Wilde
If you come to see with clarity
that the world is only a projection of the mind,
you will transcend suffering.
-Subramania Bharati
Suffering is a journey
which has an end.
-Matthew Fox
It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering,
but only to one's own suffering.
-Robert Lynd
I found that suffering is optional.
-Byron Katie
You cannot insult a man more atrociously
than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
-Cesare Pavese
Suffering should lead man
to self-inspection.
-Adolph Buchler
Suffering is the surest means
of making us truthful to ourselves.
-Jean Charles Sismondi
Rather than groaning, weeping and cursing,
it is better to try to take advantages of these inconveniences
to set to work and to grow.
How?
By not remaining focused on your suffering
but attempting to harmonize everything within you.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
Suffering in any form has as its primary object
to impel people to turn towards the path of Love.
-Julian P. Johnson
The transformation of pain to aversion
is a fundamental law of the the soul.
-Johann von Schiller
Man cannot remake himself without pain and suffering.
For he is both the marble and the sculptor.
-Alexis Carrel
To become a deeper man
is the privilege of those who have suffered.
-Oscar Wilde
Once we ourselves has suffered,
the suffering of others falls upon our softened hearts
and we become more human members of the human race.
-Henri Nouwen
Man, if you only knew the worth of suffering,
You would have chosen it ahead of anything.
-Angelus Silesius
Could it be that the person who sees most,
feels and suffers most?
-Clarice Lispector
There will always be suffering.
But we must not suffer over the suffering.
-Alan Watts
But we must not suffer over the suffering.
-Alan Watts
Those who have suffered much
have become very bitter or very gentle.
-Will Durant
If you see suffering all around you,
it is just a reflection of your own inner suffering.
If you want to alleviate suffering,
go to the root cause which is the suffering inside yourself.
-Annamalai Swami
You are not here to cry aloud
about the miseries of the human condition,
but to change them when you find them not to your liking
through joy, strength and vitality that is within you.
-Jane Roberts, "Seth"
I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe
turns on an axis of suffering;
surely the strange beauty of the world
must somewhere rest on pure joy!
-Louise Bogan
It is impossible to transmute suffering into joy
without loving.
-Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
What's this?
All that suffering for nothing,
simply for a cloud.
-Euripides
I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations
than that incomparable waste of time we call suffering.
-Colette
