This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The life of a person who demands and pursues approval is full of pain and suffering. Even if he does receive a large amount of approval, he will still demand more. We can say with certainty that not everyone will honor him as much as he would like and he will cause himself much self-imposed misery." - Menachem Taryash
"If you feel envious of others, you will never enjoy life. You will always find someone else to envy regardless of what you yourself have. There will invariably be another person who is greater than you in either wisdom, wealth, or power. Unless you stop comparing yourself with others, your entire life will be full of needless pain and suffering." - Menachem Taryash
"Unless you learn to control your desires for things you lack, your entire life will be full of pain and suffering. Even an extremely wealthy person will always find some new thing to desire." - Menachem Taryash
"What is the meaning of life? The meaning may not be expressed in words. It transcends the mind and the intellect. The meaning is to be experienced, realized... It is open to everyone who would live according to certain disciplines... The discipline of duty. Life is a field of duty, not a dance of desires... The discipline of service... We are here to help others... The opposite of love is not hate but apathy... The discipline of silence... The meaning of life is to love God and to give the service of love to the suffering children of God. And to the birds and animals who are God’s children as well." - Dada Vaswani, born Jashan Pahalraj Vaswani
"The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life." - Simone Weil
"When looking back at your past suffering, feel joy. They have already benefited you by atoning for your misdeeds and at present you no longer feel pain from those past misfortunes." - Avraham Yellin
"If you have a positive attitude towards the events of your life, even though to an outside observer your life might seem full of suffering, you nevertheless will live a happy life. What to others might seem misfortunes, you will view as opportunities for spiritual growth." - Chayim Efrayim Zaichyk
"When a person who has some personal suffering sees others empathize with him, he feels a degree of relief." - Alexander Ziskind Maimon
"This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself." - John H. Aughey, fully John Hill Aughey
"The prime goal is to alleviate suffering, and not to prolong life. And if your treatment does not alleviate suffering, but only prolongs life, that treatment should be stopped." - Christian Barnard
"How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less." - Charles Pierre Baudelaire
"We are to live with life and die with death, not separated from them. The problem of suffering is insoluble, because we think of ourselves as apart from pain and death, in opposition to them. We can be free from change only by changing with it." - R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth
"Of all suffering from fortune, the unhappiest misfortune is to have known a happy fortune." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
"There is not so agonizing a feeling in the whole catalogue of human suffering, as the first conviction that the heart of the being whom we most tenderly love is estranged from us." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"When God will educate a man, He compels him to learn bitter lessons. He sends him to school to the Necessities rather than to the Graces, that by knowing all suffering he may know also the eternal consolations." - Celia Burleigh
"The meaning of life cannot be separated from the meaning of death. Even the sun dies, so death is natural too. Only suffering must be appeased." - Henri Cartier-Bresson
"The three foundations of learning: Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much." - Joanne Catherall
"We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared." - Edward Dahlberg
"What distinguishes man from his innocent brothers, the animals... is not language, nor reason, nor even civilization... it is man's enormous appetite for suffering." - Georges Duhamel, Pen name Denis Thevenin
"Passion is always suffering, even when gratified." - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
"How do drugs, hygiene, and animal magnetism heal? It may be affirmed that they do not heal, but only relieve suffering temporarily, exchanging one disease for another." - Mary Baker Eddy
"The Scriptures teach us the best way of living, the noblest way of suffering, and the most comfortable way of dying." - John Flavel
"The hold which comptrollers of money are able to maintain on productive forces is seen to be more powerful when it is remembered that, although money is supposed to represent the real wealth of the world, there is always much more wealth that there is money, and real wealth is often compelled to wait upon money, thus leading to that most paradoxical situation - a world filled with wealth but suffering want." - Henry Ford
"Life and death are but phases of the same thing, the reverse and obverse of the same coin... I want you all to treasure death and suffering more than life and to appreciate their cleansing and purifying character. Death which is an Eternal verity is revolution, as birth and after is slow and steady evolution. Death is as necessary for man's growth as life itself... All fear is a sign of want of faith... Hate the sin and love the sinner." -
"True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death as things divine." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Too long denial of guaranteed right is sure to lead to revolution - bloody revolution, where suffering must fall upon the innocent as well as the guilty." - Ulysses S. Grant, fully Ulysses Simpson Grant, born Hiram Ulysses Grant
"Riches in their acquisition bring pain and suffering, in their loss manifold trouble and sorrow, in their possession a wild intoxication. How can we say that they confer happiness?" - Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL
"Any careful study of living things, whether wolves, bears or man, reminds one of the same direct truth; also of the clarity of the fact that evolution itself is obviously not some process of drowning being clutching at straws and climbing from suffering and trail and virtual expiration to tenuous, momentary survival. Rather, evolution has been a matter of days well-lived, chameleon strength, energy, zappy sex, sunshine stored up, inventiveness, competitiveness, and the whole fun of busy brain cells." - Edward Hoagland, fully Edward Morley Hoagland
"Holiness is religious principle put into motion. It is the love of God sent forth into circulation, on the feet, and with the hands of love to men. It is faith gone to work. It is charity coined into actions, and devotion breathing benediction on human suffering, while it goes up in intercession to the Father of all piety." - Frederick Dan Huntington
"To bear adversity with meek submission to the will of God; to endure chastisement with all long-suffering and joyfulness; to appear cheerful and amid surrounding gloom, hopeful amidst desponding circumstances, happy in God when there is nothing else to make us happy; he who does this has indeed made great advances in the divine life." - John Angell James
"There is something in obstinacy which differs from every other passion. Whenever it fails, it never recovers, but either breaks like iron, or crumbles sulkily away, like a fractured arch. Most other passions have their periods of fatigue and rest, their suffering and their cure; but obstinacy has no resource, and the first wound is mortal." -
"There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"The nature of everything is illusory and ephemeral, those with dualistic perception regard suffering as happiness, like they who lick the honey from a razor’s edge. How pitiful they who cling strongly to concrete reality: turn your attention within, my heart friends." - Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche or Nyoshul Khenpo Jamyang Dorje
"Fulfillment in life comes from giving your whole life to others. The meaning of life is to serve those who are suffering." - Joel Kinagwi
"Life means progress, and progress means suffering." - Hendrik Willem Van Loon
"Physical suffering apart, not a single sorrow exists that can touch us except through our thoughts." - Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
"The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain." - Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels
"The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt." - Thomas Merton
"The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"Reason may cure illusions, but not suffering." - Alfred de Musset, fully Alfred Louis Charles de Musset
"Our thoughts are boundless, though our frames are frail, our souls immortal, though our limbs decay; though darken’d in this poor life by a veil of suffering, dying matter, we shall play in truth’s eternal sunbeams." - Margaret Percival