Quotes about Suffering

The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.

I bear the dungeon within me; within me is winter, ice, and despair; I have darkness in my soul.

So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.

Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live in it.

I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.

The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.

there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, Les Miserables; whose fault is it? And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest?

So struggled beneath its anguish this unhappy soul. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom are aggregated all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity, He also, while the olive trees were shivering in the fierce breathe of the Infinite, had long put away from his hand the fearful chalice that appeared before him, dripping with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.

All has happened to her that will happen to her. She has felt everything, borne everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned, with that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep. She no longer avoids anything. Let all the clouds fall upon her, and all the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to her? She is a sponge that is soaked.

There are men who work hard, digging for gold: he worked hard, digging for pity. The misery of the world was his mine. Pain everywhere was an occasion for goodness always.

You need not tell me who you are. This is not my house; it is the house of Christ. It does not ask any comer whether he has a name but whether he has an affliction.