Great Throughts Treasury

"This should not come as a surprise, for indeed ‘out there’ there is no light and no colour, and there are only electromagnetic waves; ‘out there’ there is no sound and no music, there are only periodic variations of the air pressure; ‘out there’ there is no heat and no cold, there are only moving molecules with more or less mean kinetic energy, and so on. Finally, for sure, ‘out there’ there is no pain." - Heinz von Foerster

"Pain wastes the body, pleasures the understanding." - Benjamin Franklin

"The honest man pains, and then enjoys pleasures, the knave takes pleasure, and then suffers pain." - Benjamin Franklin

"Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"To seek out in a world full of joy the one thing that is certain to give you pain, and hug that to your bosom with all your strength - that's the greatest human happiness." - Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux

"Pleasures, riches, honor, and joy are sure to have care, disgrace, adversity, and affliction in their train. There is no pleasure without pain, no joy without sorrow. Oh, the folly of expecting lasting felicity in a vale of tears, or a paradise in a ruined world!" -

"Every affection of the mind that is attended with either pain or pleasure, hope or fear, is the cause of an agitation whose influence extends to the heart, and there induces change from the natural constitution, in the temperature, the pulse and the rest, which impairing all nutrition in its source and abating the powers at large, it is no wonder that various forms of incurable disease in the extremities and in the trunk are the consequence, inasmuch as in such circumstances the whole body labors under the effects of vitiated nutrition and want of native heat." - William Harvey

"Riches in their acquisition bring pain and suffering, in their loss manifold trouble and sorrow, in their possession a wild intoxication. How can we say that they confer happiness?" - Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL

"Vital is the relation between earthly sorrow and eternal satisfaction. The travail to which God’s saints are subjected results in the birth of nobler natures and more sanctified spirits. Pain always promotes progress, and suffering invariably ensures success." -

"The Golden Rule exists in each of the world's major religions... Hinduism: Do naught to others which, if done to thee, would cause thee pain: this is the sum of duty. Buddhism: A clansman [should] minister to his friends and familiars... by treating them as he treats himself. Confucianism: The Master replied: "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do unto others." Taoism: To those who are good to me, I am good; and to those who are not good to me, I am also good. And thus all get to be good. To those who are sincere with me, I am sincere; and to those who are not sincere with me, I am also sincere. And thus all get to be sincere. Zorastrianism: Whatever thou dost not approve for thyself, do not approve for anyone else. When thou hast acted in this manner, thou art righteous. Judaism: Take heed to thyself, my child, in all thy works; and be discreet in all thy behavior. And what thou thyself hatest, do to no man. Christianity: All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them. Greek Philosophy: Do not do to others what you would not wish to suffer yourself. Treat your friends as you would want them to treat you." - Robert Ernest Hume

"The mind may undoubtedly affect the body; but the body also affects the mind. There is a reaction between them; and by lessening it on either side, you diminish the pain on both." - James Henry Leigh Hunt

"The art of life is the art of avoiding pain." - Thomas Jefferson

"It is a common error, and the greater and more mischievous for being so common, to believe that repentance best becomes and most concerns dying men. Indeed, what is necessary every hour of our life is necessary in the hour of death too, as long as one lives he will have need of repentance, and therefore it is necessary in the hour of death too; but he who hath constantly exercised himself in it in his health and vigor, will do it with less pain in his sickness and weakness; and he who hath practiced it all his life, will do it with more ease and less perplexity in the hour of his death." -

"To grieve for evils is often wrong; but it is much more wrong to grieve without them. All sorrow that lasts longer than its cause is morbid, and should be shaken off as an attack of melancholy, as the forerunner of a greater evil than poverty or pain." -

"Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"Few pleasures there are indeed without an aftertouch of pain, but that is the preservation which keeps them sweet." -

"Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life." - Charles Lamb

"What is life? A gulf of troubled waters, where the soul, like a vexed bark, is tossed upon the waves of pain and pleasure by the wavering breath of passions." - Letitia Elizabeth Landon

"Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity." - Francis "Frank" William Leahy

"When pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all." -

"God has scattered several degrees of pleasure and pain in all the things that environ and affect us, and blended them together in almost all our thoughts." - John Locke

"My brother, you cannot forget your sins; but it lies within your own decision whether the remembrance shall be thankfulness and blessedness, or whether it shall be pain and loss forever." - Alexander Maclaren

"Of no day can the retrospect cause pain to a good man, nor has one passed away which he is unwilling to remember: the period of his life seems prolonged by his good acts; and we may be said to live twice, when we can reflect with pleasure on the days that are gone." - Martial, full name Marcus Valarius Martialis NULL

"The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain." - Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels

"The remembrance of pleasure doubles our pain." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"We want to live our lives as wise warriors and die as men. We may not even know what it is until the moments of our deaths. Then, the questions come. Have we worked to release another soul from pain? Have we opened a way that was once closed? Have we learned from the steeps and dips? Then we can rest assured that we have lived as men and died as warriors." - Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

"Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of our fictitious morality and religion." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?" - Margaret Oliphant, fully Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, née Margaret Oliphant Wilson

"Science will never be able to reduce the value of a sunset to arithmetic. Nor can it reduce friendship to a formula. Laughter and love, pain and loneliness, the challenge of accomplishment in living, and the depth of insight into beauty and truth: these will always surpass the scientific mastery of nature." - Louis Orr

"Remorse is the pain of sin." - Joseph Parker

"No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown." - William Penn

"Do not look at life’s long sorrow; see how small each moment’s pain." - Adelaide Anne Procter

"Pain lessens when it has no means of growth... Pain of mind is worse than pain of body." - Publius Syrus

"If you are visited by pain, examine your conduct." - Rabbah or Raba, fully Rabbah bar Nachmani NULL

"If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of seeing; of a whispering gallery that had the power of haring; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched - such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages; yet it is the same absurdity to think that the impressions of external objects upon the machine of our bodies can be the real efficient cause of thought and perception." - Paul Reichmann

"Give nobody's heart pain so long as thou canst avoid it, for one sigh may set a whole world into flame." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"Remember that pain has this most excellent quality: if prolonged it cannot be severe, and if severe it cannot be prolonged." -

"The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony." - V. S. Seturaman

"Healing is simply attempting to do more of those things that bring joy and fewer of those things that bring pain." - O. Carl Simonton

"As all before me, I have questioned, grateful for the privilege of being able to ask: What is my task? Why do we exist? All answers produce the pain of recognition, emptiness and joy." - Patti Smith, fully Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith

"Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause: hate is nothing else but pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause." -

"To give pain is the tyranny - to make happy the true empire of beauty." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

"Every year that I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not given, the power we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well." - John B. Tabb, fully John Banister Tabb

"It required the Great Depression to open the eyes of the American people to the economic, cultural, social, political, and spiritual values inherent in a great democracy. For this I am thankful. As a distinctly finite being, man learns only through tragic experiences. Progress and Pain are Siamese twins." - Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson

"What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have." - Lionel Trilling

"Whatever pain or problem we have, it helps us find a quality of presence - where we can open to it, see it, feel it, and find the truth concealed in it - that is our healing." - John Welwood

"If you've got pain and you've got hope, you've got a lot going for you." - Cecil Williams

"Fools with bookish knowledge, are children with edged weapons, they hurt themselves, and put others in pain. The half-learned is more dangerous than the simpleton." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." -