Quotes about Suffering

Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

Criminal Minds, All You Can Eat: "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with.

As a culture, we seem to have an intolerance for suffering; we tend to want those who have experienced a loss of any kind to get on with their lives as quickly as possible. Often, by minimizing the impact of significant losses, pathologizing those whose reactions are intense, and applauding those who seem relatively unaffected by tragic events, we encourage the inhibition of our own grief.

Love and Pain go together, for a time at least. If you would know Love, you must know pain too.

Thus it seems that the Cross of Christ, laden with every sinful refusal of man, must stand at the very last extremity of hell; indeed, it must stand beyond hell, where the Son is forsaken by the Father in a way that only he can know.

In principle this implies something else, something harder to grasp, namely, that his whole suffering—a suffering that goes to the utter limits—follows from and actually expresses his eternal, triune joy.

This speciously deep thought was to haunt Christian metaphysics: that love without pain and guilt remains simply a joke, a game.

Above all we must not wish to cling to our suffering. Suffering surely deepens us and enhances our person, but we must not desire to become a deeper self than God wills. To suffer no longer can be a beautiful, perhaps the ultimate sacrifice.

For many of us, we will come to the point where death will be the only healer for the pain which our lives will have come to contain.

We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.

Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it. God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it. Forced to choose between a good God who is not totally powerful, or a powerful God who is not totally good, the author of the Book of Job chooses to believe in God's goodness.