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Pain Quotes
Best Quotes About Pain (Top 100)
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One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.
Bob Marley -
We're not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be
C.S. Lewis -
Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.
Paulo Coelho -
People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.
Jim Morrison -
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.
Charles Dickens -
I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.
Edgar Allan Poe -
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love.
Sophocles -
Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.
Bob Dylan -
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
C.S. Lewis -
Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.
Lance Armstrong -
We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.
Paulo Coelho -
A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
Jack Kerouac -
I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
Khaled Hosseini -
But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
Margaret Atwood -
The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.
Charles Dickens -
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner -
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.
Marcus Aurelius -
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
Milan Kundera -
That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
Elizabeth Wurtzel -
It's easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, their present and their past, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sight. And more often then not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.
Sherrilyn Kenyon -
There's gon' be some stuff you gon' see that's gon' make it hard to smile in the future. But through whatever you see, through all the rain and the pain, you gotta keep your sense of humor. You gotta be able to smile through all this bullshit. Remember that.
Tupac Shakur -
To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!
Charlie Chaplin -
The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.
Lord Byron -
You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.
Iyanla Vanzant -
Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.
Corrie Ten Boom -
How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.
Alfred de Musset -
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
John Lennon -
Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.
Mark Twain -
I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. Adult. You have become adult.
Harlan Ellison -
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
Fernando Pessoa -
Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.
Joseph Campbell -
If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
Zora Neale Hurston -
I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.
Sylvia Plath -
There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.
Erma Bombeck -
Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.
Sigmund Freud -
Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.
Aristotle -
Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
Alice Sebold -
As far as you can avoid it, do not give grief to anyone. Never inflict your rage on another. If you hope for eternal rest, feel the pain yourself; but don’t hurt others.
Omar Khayyam -
I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
Arthur Golden -
Warriors should suffer their pain silently.
Erin Hunter -
I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.
Henry Rollins -
People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.
Jim Morrison -
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
Frederick Buechner -
A mighty pain to love it is, And 'tis a pain that pain to miss; But, of all pains, the greatest pain Is to love, but love in vain.
Abraham Cowley -
Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds."
Dan Millman -
We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.
Jim Rohn -
We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."
Percy Bysshe Shelley -
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.
Mae West -
Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May Sarton -
Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.
Mary Tyler Moore -
Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, Other members uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, The name of human you cannot retain.
Saadi -
Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.
Theodore Kaczynski -
Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.
Linda Hogan -
I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
Mother Teresa -
Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich -
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Barbara Kingsolver -
I wonder how biology can explain the physical pain you feel in your chest when all you want to do is be with someone.
Dan Howell -
No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.
Bram Stoker -
We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.
Jim Rohn -
As we live, our hearts turn colder. Cause pain is what we go through, as we become older. We get insulted by others, lose trust for those others. We get back stabbed by friends. It becomes harder for us to give others a hand. We get our heart broken by people we love, even that we give them all we have. Then we lose family over time. What else could rust the heart more over time? Blackgold.
Kanye West -
Pain is nothing compared to what it feels like to quit. Give everything you got today for tomorrow may never come.
Dan Gable -
She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.
Orson Scott Card -
Those who worship and adore the Lord through the Guru's Word forget all their pain and suffering.
Guru Gobind Singh -
I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.
Sophia Loren -
To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.
Dan Simmons -
Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.
Lewis B. Smedes -
Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. What was once foolishness to us"a crucified God"must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.
John Piper -
Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.
Walter Anderson -
It is in the whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.
M. Scott Peck -
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Saul Bellow -
Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.
Angelina Jolie -
Once, when a religionist denounced me in unmeasured terms, I sent him a card saying, "I am sure you believe that I will go to hell when I die, and that once there I will suffer all the pains and tortures the sadistic ingenuity of your deity can devise and that this torture will continue forever. Isn't that enough for you? Do you have to call me bad names in addition?"
Isaac Asimov -
You can feel the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain— no matter how smart or accomplished—they cry, they yearn, they hurt. But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should have been looking, too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: comfort, love and a peaceful heart.
Mitch Albom -
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
Ayn Rand -
My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.
Francesca Lia Block -
Humans â who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals â have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them â without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.
Carl Sagan -
Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.
Lance Armstrong -
The demon that you can swallow gives you it's power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply.
Joseph Campbell -
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
Frederick Buechner -
Laugh at yourself and at life. Not in the spirit of derision or whining self-pity, but as a remedy, a miracle drug, that will ease your pain, cure your depression, and help you to put in perspective that seemingly terrible defeat... Never take yourself too seriously.
Og Mandino -
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
George Bernard Shaw -
Love is the wanting, and the having, and the choosing, and the becoming. Love is the desire to see the person we love be and become all he or she is capable of being and becoming. Love is a willingness to lay down our own personal plans, desires, and agenda for the good of the relationship. Love is delayed gratification, pleasure, and pain. Love is being able to live and thrive apart, but choosing to be together.
Matthew Kelly -
When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.
Clarence Darrow -
The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.
Joseph Campbell -
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud -
Because my mouth Is wide with laughter And my throat Is deep with song, You do not think I suffer after I have held my pain So long? Because my mouth Is wide with laughter You do not hear My inner cry? Because my feet Are gay with dancing You do not know I die?
Langston Hughes -
Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, —will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, —or to diminish something of their pains.
Jeremy Bentham -
The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present.
Barbara de Angelis -
I suffered no pain, my hunger had taken the edge off; instead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all. I put my legs up on the bench and leaned back, the best way to feel the true well-being of seclusion. There wasn't a cloud in my mind, nor did I feel any discomfort, and I hadn't a single unfulfilled desire or craving as far as my thought could reach. I lay with open eyes in a state of utter absence from myself and felt deliciously out of it.
Knut Hamsun -
We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict.
Jim Morrison -
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this—I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
Antonin Artaud -
To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.
Alice Walker -
Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us - and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.
Louisa May Alcott -
There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
Aeschylus -
True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.
Bell hooks -
He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus -
Do something everyday that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
Mark Twain
Even More Pain Quotes
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Do something everyday that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
Mark Twain -
You hate America, don't you?' That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.
Kurt Vonnegut -
So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.
Philip Larkin -
We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
Alain de Botton -
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights.
Kahlil Gibran -
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley, And leave us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy.
Robert Burns -
Joy came always after pain.
Guillaume Apollinaire -
I love heavily tattooed women. I imagine their lives are filled with sensuality and excess, madness and generosity, impulsive natures and fights. They look like they have endured much pain and sadness, yet have the ability to transcend all of it by documenting it on the body
Margaret Cho -
People think I'm crazy to put myself through such torture, though I would argue otherwise. Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness. Dostoyevsky had it right: 'Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.' Never are my senses more engaged than when the pain sets in. There is a magic in misery. Just ask any runner.
Dean Karnazes -
Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.
Dorothy Parker -
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou -
The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
M. Scott Peck -
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
William Styron -
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike -
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
Michelangelo -
You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.
Alexander Pope -
But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
Lois McMaster Bujold -
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
Amy Tan -
What I know about living is the pain is never just ours Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo So I keep a listening to the moment the grief becomes a window When I can see what I couldn’t see before, through the glass of my most battered dream, I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds. So the next time I tell you how easily I come out of my skin, don’t try to put me back in just say here we are together at the window aching for it to all get better
Andrea Gibson -
If there is a single definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay. (48)
Stephen Levine -
Don't let your thoughts run away with you, don't start planning to bail out because you're worried about the future and how much you can take. Don't look ahead to the pain. Just get through the day,
Marcus Luttrell -
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Eugene Ionesco -
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin Britten -
Most people focus on the wrong thing; They focus on the result, not the process. The process is the sacrifice; it's all the hard parts - the sweat, the pain, the tears, the losses. You make the sacrifices anyway. You learn to enjoy them, or at least embrace them. In the end, it is the sacrifices that must fulfill you.
Ronda Rousey -
Her scent blazed in my throat and I was glad. It was a pain that meant she was alive. As long as I burned, she was safe.
Stephenie Meyer -
You've got to love what you're doing. If you love it, you can overcome any handicap, or the soreness, or all the aches and pains and continue to play for a long, long time.
Gordie Howe -
Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure... they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.
Jeremy Bentham -
I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.
Derek Jarman -
And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
Annie Proulx -
When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.
Nicholas D. Kristof -
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Unless a man has pity he is not truly a man. If a man has not wept at the worlds pain he is only half a man, and there will always be pain in the world, knowing this does not mean that a man shall dispair. A good man will seek to take pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself, and the poor unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes.
William Saroyan -
Well, while I'm here I'll do the work â and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.
Allen Ginsberg -
When your fear touches someone's pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone's pain, it become compassion.
Stephen Levine -
Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.
Tony Robbins -
The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done.
Erich Segal -
She had opened a door... and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge... Pain had made a sadist of her.
Clive Barker -
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
Sigmund Freud -
[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.
Audre Lorde -
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
Cesare Pavese -
In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior...
Thomas Harris -
I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love
Anna Akhmatova -
The quickest way to change your attitude toward pain is to accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.
M. Scott Peck -
There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
Charles Darwin -
An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed.
Knut Hamsun -
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
Kenji Miyazawa -
You gotta love livin', baby, 'cause dyin' is a pain in the ass.
Frank Sinatra -
let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to him, whose wisdom is infinite.
Amin Maalouf -
The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir -
If you cannot love the pain, you can at least love the lessons it teaches
Andrew Davidson -
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
Julius Caesar -
Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.
Hugh Laurie -
The recipe for beauty is to have less illusion and more Soul, to retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in the body into the unchanging calm and glorious freedom of spiritual harmony.
Mary Baker Eddy -
Some people when they have taken too much and have been driven beyond the point of endurance, simply crumble and give up. There are others, though they are not many, who will for some reason always be unconquerable. You meet them in time of war and also in time of peace. They have an indomitable spirit and nothing, neither pain nor torture nor threat of death, will cause them to give up.
Roald Dahl -
Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.
Spider Robinson -
The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
Herb Caen -
Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
Frank Leahy -
It's an art to live with pain... mix the light into gray.
Eddie Vedder -
Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
Camille Paglia -
Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.
Naomi Wolf -
Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.
Paul Klee -
What allows us, as human beings, to psychologically survive life on earth, with all of its pain, drama, and challenges, is a sense of purpose and meaning.
Barbara de Angelis -
If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet.
Neil Simon -
We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.
Colin Meloy -
I have discovered in my long life that there are many words and phrases which have more power than any spell of magick. The most well-known of these is, of course, I love you. But by far the most deadly is, if only. For these two words can strip a man's strength, his courage and his confidence. They become the father of regret and anguish and pain.
David Gemmell -
Sometimes with the most intense pain a paralysis of sensibility occurs. The soul disintegrates—hence the deadly frost—the free power of the mind—the shattering, ceaseless wit of this kind of despair. There is no inclination for anything any more—the person is alone, like a baleful power—as he has no connection with the rest of the world he consumes himself gradually—and in accordance with his own principle he is—misanthropic and misotheos.
Novalis -
In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and unhappiness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?
Leslie Caron -
No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable.
Orson F. Whitney -
I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.
Chaim Potok -
Sweet is true love that is given in vain, and sweet is death that takes away pain.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson -
Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.
William Faulkner -
Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.
Anne Grant -
Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
It was like that. Sometimes I'd go for a periodâdays or weeksâwithout feeling the full sweep of my loss, and then as unexpected as a thunderclap, the realization would rip the protective coating from my senses. Maybe that's the way it is with trick knees and aging griefs. Totally pain free one moment and absorbingly painful the next.
Bette Greene -
Generosity without delicacy, like wit without judgement, generally gives as much pain as pleasure.
Fanny Burney -
Your pain is a school unto itself–– and your joy a lovely temple.
Aberjhani -
Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain... To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices - today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but embrace it.
Kevyn Aucoin -
Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.
Anthony Hopkins -
Pain and sorrow and misery have a right to our assistance: compassion puts us in mind of the debt, and that we owe it to ourselves as well as to the distressed.
Joseph Butler -
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
Ted Hughes -
True values entail suffering. That’s the way we think. All in all, we tend to view melancholia as more true. We prefer music and art to contain a touch of melancholia. So melancholia in itself is a value. Unhappy and unrequited love is more romantic than happy love. For we don’t think that’s completely real, do we?…Longing is true. It may be that there’s no truth at all to long for, but the longing itself is true. Just like pain is true. We feel it inside. It’s part of our reality.
Lars von Trier -
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
Joseph Addison -
Duty is the great business of a sea officer; all private considerations must give way to it, however painful it may be.
Horatio Nelson -
We walked for some time, and grew to know each other, as best as we'd allow. These are some of the high points. They lack continuity. I don't apologize. I merely pointed it out, adding with some truth, I feel, that most liaisons lack continuity. We find ourselves in odd places at various times, and for a brief span we link our lives to others and then, our time elapsed, we move apart. Through a haze of pain occasionally, usually through a veil of memory that clings, then passes, sometimes as though we have never touched.
Harlan Ellison -
This is ten percent luck, Twenty percent skill, Fifteen percent power of will, Five percent pleasure, Fifty percent pain, and a hundred percent reason to remember the name
Mike Shinoda -
D'ye ken that the only time I am without pain is in your bed, Sassenach? When I take ye, when I lie in your arms-my wounds are healed, then, my scars forgotten.
Diana Gabaldon -
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
Maurice Maeterlinck -
Grief is itself a medicine.
William Cowper -
The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
Amiri Baraka -
People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.
Eudora Welty -
The reward of suffering is experience
Aeschylus -
Revenge is a confession of pain
Latin Proverb -
Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are... In this country, people die at 21. They die emotionally at 21, maybe younger... My responsibility as an artist is to help people get past 21... The films are a roadmap through emotional and intellectual terrain that provides a solution on how to save pain.
John Cassavetes -
Love is the fart Of every heart It pains the man when 'tis kept close, And others doth offend, when 'tis let loose.
John Suckling -
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
Walter Bagehot -
At last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn't miserable anymore: I wasn't anything at all. I was a nothing— a random configuration of molecules. If my heart still beat I didn't know it. I was aware of one thing only; next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold.
David James Duncan -
Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can't feel pain, you aren't gonna feel anything else, either.
Judith Guest -
Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other.
Laurence Sterne -
Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
Julian Barnes -
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.
Khalil Gibran -
Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.
Joseph Addison -
Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
Siri Hustvedt -
We must accept our pain Change what we can and laugh at the rest
Camille Paglia -
The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain.
Jennifer Aniston -
Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage - they've experienced pain and bought jewelry.
Rita Rudner -
The greater evil who is in- When both in wayward paths are straying? The poor sinner for the pain Or he who pays for the sin?
Juana Inテδゥs de la Cruz -
Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill outa long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causeslike arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much....
Saul Bellow -
Our sadness is an energy we discharge in order to heal. "ツヲSadness is painful. We try to avoid it. Actually discharging sadness releases the energy involved in our emotional pain. To hold it in is to freeze the pain within us. The therapeutic slogan is that grieving is the "ツ鷲ealing feeling.'
John Bradshaw -
Heroes are people who face down their fears. It is that simple. A child afraid of the dark who one day blows out the candle; a women terrified of the pain of childbirth who says, 'It is time to become a mother'. Heroism does not always live on the battlefield.
David Gemmell -
My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain.
Sara Teasdale -
Something about the joy and pain of that moment, something about the excruciating contrast, made me feel that no matter what happens now, my life has been worth it. What a ride.
Chris Crutcher -
I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind's history must be scored bloody with heartbreak. This hankering for affection is a blight upon us.
Sonya Hartnett -
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
Rebecca West -
We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.
Jeff Buckley -
And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you all through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed, Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?- And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?
Edna St. Vincent Millay -
Pain only matters when it happens to someone important.
John Barnes -
Pain (any pain—emotional, physical, mental) has a message. The information it has about our life can be remarkably specific, but it usually falls into one of two categories: We would be more alive if we did more of this and Life would be more lovely if we did less of that. Once we get the pain's message, and follow its advice, the pain goes away.
Peter McWilliams -
The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.
Publilius Syrus -
Our stresses, anxieties, pains, and problems arise because we do not see the world, others, or even ourselves as worthy of love
Prem Prakash -
Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.
Krzysztof Kieslowski -
He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain.
James Jones -
...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change—and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
Douglas Coupland -
There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.
Dan Simmons -
It would be great to be able to pass on to someone all of the successes, the failures, and the knowledge that one has had. To help someone, avoid all the fire, pain and anxiety would be wonderful.
Sylvester Stallone -
It was the books I started reading. It was the music I started listening to. It was the television I started watching. I found myself thinking again. I tried to stop because it was only causing pain. I couldn't. Wen all this is in your head it has to come out into your life. If it doesn't, you get crushed. I'm not going to get crushed.
Irvine Welsh -
Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.
Norman Cousins -
I must fling myself down and writhe; I must strive with every piece of force I possess; I bruise and batter myself against the floor, the walls; I strain and sob and exhaust myself, and begin again, and exhaust myself again; but do I feel pain? Never. How can I feel pain? There is no place for it.
Harry Houdini -
It's essential to tell the truth at all times. This will reduce life's pain. Lying distorts reality. All forms of distorted thinking must be corrected.
John Bradshaw -
There is no birth of consciousness without pain.
Carl Jung -
What first truly stirred my soul was not fear or pain, nor was it pleasure or games; it was the yearning for freedom. I had to gain freedom-but from what, from whom? Little by little, in the course of time, I mounted freedom's rough unaccommodating ascent. To gain freedom first of all from the Turk, that was the initial step; after that, later, this new struggle began: to gain freedom from the inner Turk-from ignorance, malice and envy, from fear and laziness, from dazzling false ideas; and finally from idols, all of them, even the most revered and beloved.
Nikos Kazantzakis -
When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
Ingrid Newkirk -
There are two kinds of people in the world, Notre Dame lovers and Notre Dame haters. And, quite frankly, they're both a pain in the ass.
Dan Devine -
Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.
Spider Robinson -
It's easy to win forgiveness for being wrong; being right is what gets you into real trouble.
Bjarne Stroustrup -
What do you know about sooner or later? Is a moment only a moment when you're in pain?
Bette Greene -
The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
George Orwell -
Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you're gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold.
Alice Hoffman -
One does not become fully human painlessly.
Rollo May -
If you love somebody; You better let it out; Don't hold it back; While you're trying to figure it out; Cause the only real pain a heart can ever know; Is the sorrow of regret; When you don't let your feelings show. So, did you say it, Did you mean it?
Jewel -
The pain we feel When someone leaves our life is in direct proportion to the joy they bring while a part of our life for a few moments. In my life you made me feel as if I truly meant something to someone
Javan -
Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.
Lester Bangs -
Peace does not dwell in outward things but within the soul; we may preserve it in the midst of the bitterest pain, if our will remains firm and submissive. Peace in this life springs from acquiescence to, not an exemption from, suffering.
Francois Fenelon -
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron -
It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.
Barbara Taylor Bradford -
Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
Nicole Krauss -
If you were Queen of pleasure And I were King of pain We'd hunt down Love together, Pluck out his flying-feather, And teach his feet a measure, And find his mouth a rein; If you were Queen of pleasure And I were King of pain.
Algernon Charles Swinburne -
There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.
Jean de la Bruyere -
This pain to remain the same outweigh the pain to change... When you get tired enough is when you begin to want to sacrifice everything inside of youâthe fear just leaves
Erykah Badu -
Men may scoff, and men may pray, But they pay Every pleasure with a pain.
William Ernest Henley -
I'm becoming more and more myself with time. I guess that's what grace is. The refinement of your soul through time.
Jewel -
Reality is a state of mind. To the banker, the money in his ledger book is all very real, though he doesn't actually see it or touch it. But to the Brahma, it simply doesn't exist the way the air and the earth, pain and loss do. To him, the banker's reality is folly. To the banker, the Brahma's ideas are as inconsequential as dust.
Libba Bray -
Faith in the face of disappointment is only enhanced by laughter in the face of pain.
Marc Maron -
Never a lip is curved with pain that can't be kissed into smiles again.
Bret Harte -
No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.
Cyril Connolly -
Domestic violence causes far more pain than the visible marks of bruises and scars. It is devastating to be abused by someone that you love and think loves you in return. It is estimated that approximately 3 million incidents of domestic violence are reported each year in the United States.
Dianne Feinstein -
I find the greatest songs in the world come out of pain, and I don't like it! Here's what it does: It strips away all of your facade. It makes you so honest. It's cleansing.
Lionel Richie -
The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you.
Anthony Robbins -
Pain has its own noble joy, when it starts a strong consciousness of life, from a stagnant one.
John Sterling -
In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.
John Leonard -
Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.
John Patrick -
We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? . . .I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.
Chaim Potok -
His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way.
Mervyn Peake -
Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
William Styron -
Yes, confidence was knowing I could do anything. But, I realized, confidence must always be rooted in work. In sweat. In pain-good pain. And in honesty.
Duff McKagan -
I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.... Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May Sarton -
Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent.
Francis Picabia -
Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran, Pleasure with pain for leaven, Summer with flowers that fell, Remembrance fallen from heaven, And Madness risen from hell, Strength without hands to smite, Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And Life, the shadow of death.
Algernon Charles Swinburne -
I wanted a drink. There were a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed a drink, that I couldn't bear it without it. But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It'll hurt, it'll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
Lawrence Block -
Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?
Cesare Pavese -
Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind...And each time it plays you feel the clap of pain again...Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory Forgiving sets you free.
Lewis B. Smedes -
Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache: do be my enemy for friendship's sake.
William Blake -
True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.
Joy Harjo -
You learnt that, whatever you are doing in life, obstacles don't matter very much. Pain or other circumstances can be there, but if you want to do a job bad enough, you'll find a way to get it done.
Jack Youngblood -
Before we make love my husband takes a pain killer.
Joan Rivers -
Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.
Harold Bloom -
But our wounds are part of who we are...and there is nothing left to chance....And pain's the pen that writes the songs....That call us forth to dance
Michael Card -
I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!
Chaim Potok -
The sweetness of love is short-lived, but the pain endures.
Thomas Malory -
Only the most saintly and delusional among us welcomes all pain as challenge, perceives all loss as harsh blessing.
Scott Jurek -
I'm not into working out. My philosophy: No pain, no pain.
Carol Leifer -
One of the sweet things about pain and sorrow is that they show us how well we are loved, how much kindness there is in the world, and how easily we can make others happy in the same way when they need help and sympathy.
Louisa May Alcott -
Pain is no evil, unless it conquers us.
Charles Kingsley -
My mother-in-law had a pain beneath her left breast. Turned out to be a trick knee.
Phyllis Diller -
The Black writer explains pain to those who inflict it.
Alice Childress -
I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.
Andrew Sullivan -
God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces, which is why sharing pain freely feels very much like love, and may be the same thing. (207)
Keith Ablow -
The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
Erica Jong -
Nothing begins, and nothing ends, That is not paid with moan; For we are born in others pain And perish in our own.
Francis Thompson -
We are largely the playthings of our fears. To one, fear of the dark; to another, of physical pain; to a third, of public ridicule; to a fourth, of poverty; to a fifth, of loneliness ... for all of us, our particular creature waits in ambush.
Horace Walpole -
God sweetens outward pain with inward peace.
Thomas Watson -
The pain comes from more than the facts of circumstance, or the deeds of others. It comes from within. From understanding what we lost. It comes from knowing how foolish we were - vain, arrogant children - when we thought ourselves happy. It comes from knowing how fragile and doomed the old ways were, just when we thought them and ourselves, secure!. The pain comes from knowing we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again.
John Jakes -
I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation.
William Irwin Thompson -
To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful—
John Gardner -
Everything I was feeling, all the hurt and the pain and the emotion I was going through, I put into my music.
Keith Sweat -
The difference between the mile and the marathon is the difference between burning your fingers with a match and being slowly roasted over hot coals.
Hal Higdon -
Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life.
Charles Lamb -
Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.
Spider Robinson -
There has never been a great athlete who died not knowing what pain is.
Bill Bradley -
Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson -
Your face encompasses the beauty of the whole earth. Your lips, as red as ripening fruit, gently part as if in pain. It is the smile of a corpse. Now the hand of death touches life. The chain is forged that links the thousand families that are dead to the thousand generations to come.
Edvard Munch -
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
Cyril Connolly -
Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!
Joseph Addison -
In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron -
Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.
Alice James -
You are all things. Denying, rejecting, judging or hiding from any aspect of your total being creates pain and results in a lack of wholeness.
Joy Page -
How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.
Thomas Jefferson -
The worst part a man can suffer is to have insight into much and power over nothing.
Herodotus -
Maybe right and wrong did not move, but understanding of them did. The wrenching pain of walking the same path, even for a short space, tore away the willingness to judge.
Anne Perry -
I fantasize about going back to high school with the knowledge I have now. I would shine. I would have a good time, I would have a girlfriend. I think that's where a lot of my pain comes from. I think I never had any teenage years to go back to.
Spalding Gray -
We will do anything to get away from our own pain. We will change our lives, rip people out, swallow a bottle of life-ending pills. When we hurt more than we can bear, when our lives get that dark, it's shocking what we will do to protect ourselves.
Pamela Ribon -
In every change, in every falling leaf there is some pain, some beauty. And that's the way new leaves grow.
Amit Ray -
The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.
Henry Miller -
The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
Walter Bagehot -
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
Emile M. Cioran -
Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again.
Tori Amos -
The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.
Jose Ortega y Gasset -
The lifestyle of many of our colleagues has been very pompous. They conduct weddings and birthdays in such an ostentatious manner that it pains me a lot. It appears that they are making fun of our commitment to the poor.
Sonia Gandhi -
It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.
Epictetus -
It's odd that you can get so anesthetized by your own pain or your own problem that you don't quite fully share the hell of someone close to you.
Lady Bird Johnson -
Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.
Coco Chanel -
Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster's terms, 'nirvana' means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that's pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.
Kurt Cobain -
Bruce Willis. Pain in my ass, no problem about that. We just didn't get along. We got along off camera, but shooting we just didn't get along.
Antoine Fuqua -
Unborn children can experience pain even more so than adults as the baby has more pain receptors per square inch than at any other time in its life.
Sam Brownback -
Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin
Yevgeny Yevtushenko -
The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
William Styron -
Luckily, I never feel at one time more than half my pains.
Joseph Joubert -
Researches tested a new form of medical marijuana that treats pain but doesn't get the user high, prompting patients who need medical marijuana to declare, 'Thank you?'
Jimmy Fallon -
Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain.
John Selden -
Pains of love be sweeter far than all other pleasures are.
John Dryden -
I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.
Dorothy Allison -
They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide?
Adrienne Rich -
The more severe the pain or illness, the more severe will be the necessary changes. These may involve breaking bad habits, or acquiring some new and better ones.
Peter McWilliams -
Do not consider painful what is good for you.
Euripides -
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
Edith Hamilton -
No gains without pains.
Benjamin Franklin -
No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.
William Penn -
I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.
Linda Pastan -
There are people still in the Republican Party that I believe practice the communication of anger, of disappointment, of regret, of pain, of sorrow, of suffering. That's not what the American people want to hear.
Frank Luntz -
Compared to dancing, films seemed to me to be the work of lay bums. There was no physical pain; it was enough to say and imagine what was in the script. It was very easy for me.
Victoria Abril -
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
Toni Morrison -
What has happened to architecture since the second world war that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?
Bernard Levin -
To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking.
Alcaeus -
There are only three sins - causing pain, causing fear, and causing anguish. The rest is window dressing.
Roger Caras -
No, there's going to be no even tenor with me. The more uneven it is the happier I shall be. And when my time comes to die, I'll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain, thrills " every emotion that any human ever had " and I'll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed.
Richard Halliburton -
Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain.
Emma Lazarus -
I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark
Mary Stewart -
You must take the first step. The first steps will take some effort, maybe pain. But after that, everything that has to be done is real-life movement.
Ben Stein -
Experiencing life through a book can help you learn without all the pain of going through the experiences first hand.
Bette Greene -
There's no original evil left in the world. Everyone's just recycling pain. (257)
Keith Ablow -
Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
Annie Dillard -
A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -
Pain cannot be ignored. However, it can be endured. When necessary, a great deal of pain can be endured. Just ask my mother.
Charlie Huston -
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison -
The ability to laugh at life is right at the top, with love and communication, in the hierarchy of our needs. Humour has much to do with pain; it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel, so that we gain distance and through laughter, relief.
Sara Davidson -
And old affront will stir the heart Through years of rankling pain.
Jean Ingelow -
And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
Lawrence Block -
It's not till sex has died out between a man and a woman that they can really love. And now I mean affection. Now I mean to be fond of (as one is fond of oneself) -to hope, to be disappointed, to live inside the other heart. When I look back on the pain of sex, the love like a wild fox so ready to bite, the antagonism that sits like a twin beside love, and contrast it with affection, so deeply unrepeatable, of two people who have lived a life together (and of whom one must die) it's the affection I find richer. It's that I would have again. Not all those doubtful rainbow colors.
Enid Bagnold -
I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don't despise it. But it can't quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it.
Georges Bernanos -
Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite are contrived to be constant companions.
Pierre Charron -
From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.
Michelangelo -
The pain comes from knowing that we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be so ignorant again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again. Losing innocence. Remembering heaven. That was the essence of hell.
John Jakes -
We all know pain doesn't exist without some coexisting depression.
Jerry Hall -
..various people had long had the feeling that gain through pain was nature's way
Robert Wright -
We have become accustomed to living our life with joy amidst pain and challenges.
Dana Reeve -
When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty.
Charles Horton Cooley -
Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.
Lillie Langtry -
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie -
Remorse is the pain of sin.
Theodore Parker -
Compassion is an emotion of which we ought never to be ashamed. Graceful, particularly in youth, is the tear of sympathy, and the heart that melts at the tale of woe. We should not permit ease and indulgence to contract our affections, and wrap us up in a selfish enjoyment; but we should accustom ourselves to think of the distresses of human, life, of the solitary cottage; the dying parent, and the weeping orphan. Nor ought we ever to sport with pain and distress in any of our amusements, or treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty.
Hugh Blair -
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
Kahlil Gibran -
When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books.
James Freeman Clarke -
There's a lot of pain in my heart because what I accomplished was second to none. I'm not losing any sleep, but I do pay attention every year at this time.
Bob Hayes -
And the wind that saddens, the sea that gladdens, Are singing the selfsame strain.
Bayard Taylor -
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
Samuel Butler -
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
Karl Marx -
Oh, the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling. It's the unraveling and it undoes all the joy that could be. .
Joni Mitchell -
If I can bring joy into the world, if I can get people to stop thinking about their pain for a moment, or the fact the tomorrow morning they're going to get up and tell their boss off... then I'll be successful.
Bobby McFerrin -
Tis not where we lie but whence we fell; the loss of Heaven's the greatest pain in Hell.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca -
What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?
Margaret Oliphant -
The hardest thing you can do is smile when you are ill, in pain, or depressed. But this no-cost remedy is a necessary first half-step if you are to start on the road to recovery.
Allen Klein -
Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
William Hazlitt -
It's also very painful, because I feel, and I know, probably all women my age and older feel like we're better and have more to give and are more fun now.
Barbara Hershey -
Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.
Christian Wiman -
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.
Buddha -
We can't learn without pain.
Aristotle -
This is a world in which reasons are made up because reality is too painful.
Barry Diller -
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world
C.S. Lewis -
The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him.
Mahatma Gandhi -
God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain
C.S. Lewis -
The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.
William Hazlitt -
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
Marcel Proust -
Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains.
Democritus -
He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual's armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world's chaos and warfare.
Gay Talese -
You go though a period of immense pain when reality meets the dream.
Charlotte Rampling -
Sometimes what we call love is just a settling of old scores, or a seeking of forbidden pain, or a circuitous path to the kingdom of cruelty, or she may simply have confused lack of capital with heroism while searching for rescue without knowing from what.
Anne Roiphe -
A teardrop on earth summons the King of heaven.
Charles R. Swindoll -
All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain and languor; it's like spending this year part of next year's revenue.
Jonathan Swift -
One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.
Benjamin Haydon -
When yer in a funk, people in love are a royal pain in the patookus.
Caroline Rhea -
Where there is love there is pain
Spanish Proverb -
Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
Peter De Vries -
Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
Aristotle -
Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain.
Charlie Chaplin -
What is deservedly suffered must be borne with calmness, but when the pain is unmerited, the grief is resistless.
Ovid -
In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made
Kathleen Norris -
We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.
Elizabeth Drew -
I think all the boys that write the screaming stuff would write the best love songs... because they have the most to hide. The guys that are in the most pain are usually the ones with the biggest hearts.
Tori Amos -
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
Pearl S. Buck -
Pain is a poison; pleasure an intoxicant.
Kedar Joshi -
Debts are nowadays like children begot with pleasure, but brought forth in pain
Moliere -
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Winston Churchill -
There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.
William Trevor -
But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.
Oscar Wilde -
If I can delay that [pain] for a moment and bring a little joy. . . and help them to see things a little differently, then I'll be successful.
Bobby McFerrin -
It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.
Jessica Mitford -
The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it.
Laurence Sterne -
Half to forget the wandering and pain, Half to remember days that have gone by, And dream and dream that I am home again!
James Elroy Flecker -
There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.
Umberto Eco -
Jerry Weintraub, the producer, might be a pain in the ass, but he really knows how to treat his actors.
Bernie Mac -
Fatigue dulls the pain, but awakes enticing thoughts of death. So! that is the way in which you are tempted to overcome your loneliness — by making the ultimate escape from life. — No! It may be that death is to be your ultimate gift to life: it must not be an act of treachery against it.
Dag Hammarskjold -
Men expect that religion should cost them no pains, that happiness should drop into their laps without any design and endeavor on their part, and that, after they have done what they please while they live, God should snatch them up to heaven when they die. But though the commandments of God be not grievous, yet it is fit to let men know that they are not thus easy.
John Tillotson -
Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -
Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.
Kahlil Gibran