Quotes about Suffering

The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me.

He who has ascended the cross and refuses to drink the vinegar mingled with gall is the one who knows the Lord. Many go up to the cross rather reluctantly, still thinking of drinking vinegar mingled with gall to alleviate their pain. All who say—"The cup which the Father has given me, shall I not drink it?"—will not drink the cup of vinegar mingled with gall.

What can't be helped must be endured.

If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its own love be swayed down to the world? ...how it might, because it could know its own creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death?

Love fills the empty places and flows from what was once the epicenter of the wound. And it's the flowing that washes out the residue of the pain and makes us whole again. That's the crazy miracle that is love. The more you pour out, the more you have to pour.

I sat in that room and realized that you can cut off a finger, cut off a hand, even cut off a leg, but if you take a woman's breast, you are cutting more than just a body part.

Pain is weakness leaving your body

Something only God can do. He both broke and filled my heart at the same time. I still don't understand that.

Sometimes I think that hell is two places: it's a place you end up, but it's also a place that you live before you get there. I don't know if the devil's got horns and a spear for a tail, but I don't think that's the point. The point is that hell is separate from love. If Lucifer knows anything, he knows that. And ever since Emma left, I'd known the same thing. It's a lonely, desolate place.

I love them without trying to change them. I look at their suffering, their hopelessness, and while I'd like to wave a hand and fix it, I can't, so I do what I can... Climb down in their misery and love them where they are... People would much rather die holding someone's hand than live alone.

God is able to take your life, with all of the heartache, all of the pain, all of the regret, all of the missed opportunities, and use you for His glory.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.