#suffering

"At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze."

"When life gives you pain, accept it. When life gives you happiness, reject it."

"Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands."

"O world, world when I was younger I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds. But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles…a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope."

"It is important never to separate love and knowledge, compassion and wisdom. A wisdom without compassion is closed upon itself and does not bear fruit. A compassion without wisdom is a madness and a cause of suffering."

"Suffering teaches joy."

"When one takes action for others, one's own suffering is transformed into the energy that can keep one moving forward; a light of hope illuminating a new tomorrow for oneself and others is kindled."

"It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love."

"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."

"Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent."

"God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever."

"Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead."

"'Shoot the wounded... what we do to people who are the most vulnerable... we 'shoot the wounded.' As if they haven't suffered enough, we add to it by gossiping and treating hurt people like outcasts."..."I think we killed Ronnie's spirit... Instead of coming alongside her and supporting her through this, I failed her..."

"I hope suffering don't exist."

"When you mature in your relationship with God you realize how suffering and patience are like eating your spiritual vegetables."

"Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering."

"If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can."

"Judged by the normal standards of human affairs, the lives of men and women of God may look overburdened with suffering, and even inconclusive."

"I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us."

"I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future."