Here is a compilation of 77 powerful quotes about suffering that are aimed to inspire and help individuals overcome hardship.
These quotes, gathered from various famous personalities, explore the universal experience of suffering, which can be triggered by events such as death, disasters and other difficult life situations.
Since such events are often inevitable, these quotes emphasize resilience, learning and moving forward.
They offer insights and comfort in dealing with pain and suffering, encouraging readers not only to draw strength from them but also to extend support to others who might be undergoing similar trials.
Here are some suffering quotes that could heal you.
Table of Contents
Top 10 Suffering Quotes
No victory without suffering. ~ J. R. R. Tolkien.
Great souls suffer in silence. ~ Friedrich Schiller.
Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men. ~ Seneca.
The reward of suffering is experience. ~ Harry S. Truman.
Suffering is one of life’s great teachers. ~ Bryant H. McGill.
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain. ~ Karl Marx.
I don’t know how to live good. I only know how to suffer. ~ Bob Marley.
You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. ~ John Green.
Suffering Quotes
Suffering for Jesus is temporary. Pleasure in Jesus is eternal. ~ John Piper.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche.
God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with. ~ Henry Ward Beecher.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. ~ Marcel Proust.
When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune. ~ Albert Camus.
In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. ~ Elie Wiesel.
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears. ~ Michel de Montaigne.
Count no mortal fortunate till he has departed this life free from pain. ~ Sophocles.
All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire. ~ Edgar Allan Poe.
Take heart. Suffering, when it climbs the highest, lasts but a little time. ~ Aeschylus.
Best Suffering Quotes Ideas Images
Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility. ~ Elder Thaddeus.
A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears. ~ Michel de Montaigne.
To become a spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life. ~ Oscar Wilde.
Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand. ~ Patti Smith.
If pain doesn’t lead to humility, you have wasted your suffering. ~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer.
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering… ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The trick to healing from suffering, I think, is deciding that the pain was worth it. ~ Aella.
Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone? ~ Pablo Neruda.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. ~ Helen Keller.
Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy. ~ Alexandre Dumas.
Best Quotes about Suffering
Sometimes it takes great suffering to pierce the soul and open it up to greatness. ~ Jocelyn Murray.
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. ~ Tom Waits.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not. ~ C.S. Lewis.
Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can. ~ Dodie Smith.
When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do. ~ Philip Yancey.
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. ~ Elie Wiesel.
No matter how much you hate or how much you suffer, you can’t bring the dead back to life. ~ Watsuki Nobuhiro.
Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings. ~ Ram Dass.
Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace. ~ Ram Dass.
Related Quotes: Self Destruction Quotes about Pain and Suffering and Best No Pain No Gain Quotes for Motivation and Inspiration
Quotes on Suffering
Our past may explain why we’re suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage. ~ Joyce Meyer.
If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer. ~ David Deida.
I suffer because my interactions with others do not meet the expectations I did not know I had. ~ Jim McDonald.
If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh.
The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end. ~ Neal Shusterman.
It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. ~ H.G. Wells.
Suffering is due to our disconnection with the inner soul. Meditation is establishing that connection. ~ Amit Ray.
Strong people alone know how to organize their suffering so as to bear only the most necessary pain. ~ Emil Dorian.
Pain and Suffering Quotes
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars. ~ Kahlil Gibran.
Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead. ~ Tennessee Williams.
The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day. ~ Charles Dickens.
Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term, so you can get paid in the long term. ~ Naval Ravikant.
For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering. ~ Albert Camus.
The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. ~ Charles Du Bos.
Happiness is not a reward – it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment – it is a result. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll.
Suffering Sayings and Quotes
There are some wounds that one can heal only by deepening them and making them worse. ~ Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam.
We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can evolve in a state of joy and inspiration. ~ Joe Dispenza.
We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it. ~ Willie Nelson.
Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment. ~ Eckhart Tolle.
People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering. ~ Edward St. Aubyn.
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered until you experience it properly and fully the first time. ~ Ben Okri.
Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on cliches and stay there, until the spirit dies as well. ~ Robert Greene.
It takes great courage to open one’s heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world. ~ Vincent A. Gallagher.
Suffering means being cut off from God. Therefore those who live in communion with him cannot really suffer. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Famous Suffering Quotes
Never stop just because you feel defeated. The journey to the other side is attainable only after great suffering. ~ Santosh Kalwar.
I don’t believe there is pleasure in life. I believe there is only relief of pain. We have to suffer to be on top. ~ Georges St-Pierre.
We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
If there was a God, he’d guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I’d cut loose my pain, my longing. ~ Khaled Hosseini.
It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering. ~ Natsume Sōseki.
Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering. ~ Terry Tempest Williams.
The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. ~ Ben Okri.
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. ~ Julian Barnes.
Suffering presents us with a challenge: to find our goals and purpose in our lives that make even the worst situation worth living through. ~ Viktor E. Frankl.
There are far too many silent sufferers. Not because they don’t yearn to reach out, but because they’ve tried and found no one who cares. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich.
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. ~ Sigmund Freud.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. ~ C.S. Lewis.
We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent. ~ Bell Hooks.
So these were the 77 Quotes about Suffering.
If you like these quotes, then you can also read our other posts on Social Work Quotes and Special Needs Quotes and Camping Quotes and Small Town Quotes and Teacher Appreciation.
