This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is no purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsiblity that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to gorow in spite of all indiginities." - Gordon Willard Allport
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man's life a sorrow and a suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Only by suffering does the fool learn." - Hesiod NULL
"Morality... must have the more power over the human heart the more purely it is exhibited. Whence it follows that, if the law of morality and the image of holiness and virtue are to exercise any influence at all on our souls, they can do so only so far as they are laid to heart in their purity as motives, unmixed with any view to prosperity, for it is in suffering that they display themselves most nobly." - Immanuel Kant
"There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable." - Immanuel Kant
"The secret cause of all suffering, is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed." - James Joyce
"God’s suffering for man was the Nadir, the lowerst point in God’s humiliation; man’s suffering for God is the Zenith, the highest point of man’s exaltation." - John Donne
"Suffering for truth's sake is fortitude to the highest victory, and to the faithful death the gate of life." - John Milton
"To be weak is miserable, doing or suffering." - John Milton
"The willingness to harm or hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. Owning them means taking responsibility for them. Taking responsibility means not letting fear completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness of our own clinging and rejecting, and a willingness to grapple with these mind states, however painful the encounter, can free us from this circle of suffering. Without a daily embodiment in practice, lofty ideals tend to succumb to self-interest." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"The secret cause of all suffering is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed." - Joseph Campbell
"The search for truth should be the goal of our activities; it is the sole end worthy of them. Doubtless we should first bend our efforts to assuage human suffering, but why? Not to suffer is a negative ideal more surely attained by the annihilation of the world. If we wish more and more to free man from material cares, it is that he may be able to employ the liberty obtained in the study and contemplation of truth." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"Life is an island in an ocean of loneliness, an island whose rocks are hopes, whose trees are dreams, whose flowers are solitude, and whose brooks are thirst. Your life, my fellow men, is an island separated from all other islands and regions. No matter how many are the ships that leave your shores for other climes, no matter how many are the fleets that touch your coast, you remain a solitary island, suffering the pangs of loneliness and yearning for happiness. You are unknown to your fellow men and far removed from their sympathy and understanding." - Kahlil Gibran
"Without meaning to belittle the wonders of science, I do not think they can absolve mankind of suffering, desire, madness, and death." - Lewis H. Lapham
"Discipline is the tool required to solve life's problems. What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems directly? Delaying gratification, accepting responsibility, dedication to truth, and balance." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Physics has discovered the edge of infinity; the wisdom of the ages takes us across the border, which is nowhere but in us. When each person rejoins the stream of evolution that upholds the galaxies ands sweeps life forward on the wave of eternity, human existence will cease to contain any suffering, and our real purpose in living - to create heaven on earth - will be realized." - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma
"Present suffering is not enjoyable, but life would be worth little without it." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Present suffering is not enjoyable, but life would be worth little without it... Though the aspect of suffering is hard, the prospect is hopeful, and the retrospect will start a song, if we are “the called according to his purpose,” in suffering." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"Nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility. It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting point for a fresh development." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"They learn in suffering what they teach in song." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"If you have a wounded heart, touch it as little as you would an injured eye. There are only two remedies for the suffering of the soul: hope and patience." - Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
"You cannot do wrong without suffering." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In the ultimate depth of being, we find ourselves no longer separate but, rather, part of the unity of the universe. That unity includes the sufferer and the suffering, and the healer and that which heals. Therefore, all acts of healing are ultimately our selves healing our Self." - Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert
"Pity is a species of sadness, mingled with love or good-will towards those whom we see suffering some evil of which we consider them undeserving." - René Descartes
"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you." - Rita Mae Brown
"Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"The value of human life lies in the fact of suffering, for where there is no suffering, no consciousness of karmic bondage, there will be no power of attaining spiritual experience and thereby reaching the field of non-distinction. Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
"Experience is the extract of suffering." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
"Wisdom is seldom gained without suffering." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
"As in labor, the more one doth exercise, the more one is enabled to do, strength growing upon work; so, with the use of suffering, men’s minds get the habit of suffering, and all fears and terrors are to them but as a summons to battle, whereof they know beforehand they shall come off victorious." - Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
"There never is any duality. The principle of awareness, Atman, never engages in any activity, although from this pure principle alone, the luminous, transparent, insubstantial universe spontaneously unfolds. When the practitioner is consciously identified, not with any expression of awareness but with the living principle of awareness... there remains no sense of intrinsic involvement with polarities such as good and evil, virtue and vice, self and other, existence and nonexistence. However, when one identifies with activity rather than with principle, manifesting an ego that claims to generate various chains of events, then the tensions between polar opposites split that person’s consciousness, creating various forms of obvious and subtle suffering." -
"For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering." - Susan Sontag
"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, where the past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point , the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. The inner freedom from the practical desire, the release from action and suffering, release from the inner and outer compulsion, yet surrounded by a grace of sense, a white light still and moving..." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"He who is happy in spite of the suffering that afflicts him brings salvation to the world." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"God in eternity is without contradiction, suffering and grief, and nothing can hurt or vex him of all that is or befalleth. But with God, when he is made Man, it is otherwise." - Theologia Germanica, aka Theologia Deutsch or Teutsch NULL
"The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves “inside the skin” of the other." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes fo mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and yo have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"Suffering forces our attention toward places we would normally neglect." - Thomas Moore
"An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of behavior: namely, in man's attitude to this existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate as death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete." -
"The salvation of the world is in man's suffering." - William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner