Quotes about Suffering

You must always check things out by going to the person in question and asking for his or her help: "Dear one, I am suffering so much, help me please.

I have been offered the noble opportunity to join my voice with that of the Crucified as He cries out, 'Father, forgive them.

By the same token, Christians find that, insofar as the "prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day" (the ordinary stuff of life) are taken and offered up to God in union with Jesus Christ's own self-offering, they are transfigured—transubstantiated—and restored to us, not as the inert routines of the day, or as sheer, intractable adversity, or as boredom, which they might otherwise appear to be, but rather as vessels for grace.

I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.

Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.

The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.

it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.

This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.

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.

Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men.

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly.

The truth that many people never understand is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more your suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things start to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.