Suffering Quotes - Page 10

Life is like a story, when all the resolution is resolved, you heave a sigh of relief.

Miracles can only inhabit the reality of our awareness when we surrender our need for the familiar to our desire for the limitless.

It doesn't matter who started it or what it's really about...war usually ends up sucking most for women. Even when we're not fighting the battles ourselves, we somehow always end up with the lion's share of the suffering.

Fighting makes us feel alive, until it kills us. If it doesn’t kill us, the pain of sitting alone with ourselves, quietly, under constant assault by our own thoughts and memories of war can easily be enough to make us wish we’d died in battle instead.

Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.

Hell in life indicates a state of suffering, of agony, of torture (by others, by circumstances, or by ourselves), and of insipid colors and little joy. Hell is a heavy vibration that drags us spiraling down from the highest to the lowest, darkest vibrations..

We know - more from the faces immortalized on a handful of photographs than from the words of survivors - that the women and men who experienced that moment in Hiroshima believed they had encountered the beginning of the end of the world. There will never be enough future to prove them wrong.

I love you, Lucien, but I am a muse, you are an artist, I am not here to make you comfortable.

It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.

Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)

But maybe that's how it is with art. You suffer, and in the end, everyone thinks it's cool.

Sometimes I think my scars are beautiful, but then I remember not everyone shares the same love of art.

…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.

If ever in pain, I think the best thing we can do is to create something.

Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it.

There is no error more absurd, and yet more rooted in the heart of man, than the belief that his sufferings will promote his spiritual safety.

For the first time in this 11 years-I have come to love the darkness-for I believe now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus' dakness and pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it [as] a "spiritual side of 'your work'"... (Mother Teresa, quoated in Kolodiejchuk, p. 208).

For many of us, especially being so fortunate to live in a first-world country, the vast majority of pain we experience is due to the seriousness with which we identify with our thoughts.

Every dimension of your suffering will instruct you, until you have learned your essential lessons.

Through spiritual maturity you will see new ways to avoid unnecessary suffering; wiser ways to endure unavoidable hardships with grace, and opportunities to turn your pain into lessons of service and healing for others.