This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Suffering only becomes unbearable when, separated from the great silence in the world, it is merely a part of the noise of history, and then has to bear its burden alone." - Max Picard
"The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony." - V. S. Seturaman
"To know our purpose for being here, we have to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know God who created us... Through knowing God’s love, through prayer, we come to find our best self. Each of us has a call. No two of us are alike in our potential for growth and development... Sometimes we find our meaning from our successes. Sometimes suffering is the prelude to understanding, and we realize that eventually, out of darkness, comes light... I chose to try to know God and to find a deeper meaning in life through sharing my life with others, reaching out and being more vulnerable and open to the stranger, the one in need, the depressed and the ill... The specific purpose each one of us discovers along the way, we do have a common purpose. It is to become part of the life of God; to know, love and serve Him; to come to know and love our brothers and sisters; to be energized and made whole by God’s tremendous love for us in this life and the next, a love that binds us all together." - Gilmary Simmons, born Eileen Catherine Simmons
"The white man’s civilization with its inhuman economic competition and rugged individualism has produced millions of physical and mental wrecks. It has produced enough vices to fill Dante’s hell. Nine-tenths of the people who reach forty are suffering from shattered nerves." - Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
"Eventually we'll have to confront the fact that world suffering is the result of ill-conceived thoughts taking form through misdirected action. If we're going to survive as a species, we must relinquish - to unprecedented levels, - qualities such as greed, hatred, and delusion. In other words, our very survival depends on accelerated levels of psychological and spiritual maturation." - Roger N. Walsh
"We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, "I am suffering," than to say, "This landscape is ugly."" - Simone Weil
"To explain the relative peace of the wicked and suffering of the righteous is beyond us." - Yannai NULL
"Suffering was a curse from which man fled, not it becomes a purification of the soul, a sacred trial sent by Eternal Love, a divine dispensation meant to sanctify and ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a strange initiation into happiness." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"God has laid upon man the duty of being free, of safeguarding freedom of spirit, no matter how difficult that may be, or how much sacrifice and suffering it may require." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
"The world is full of wickedness and misery precisely because it is based on freedom – yet that freedom constitutes the whole dignity of man and of his world. Doubtless at the price of its repudiation evil and suffering could be abolished, and the world forced to be “good” and “happy”; but man would have lost his likeness to God, which primarily resides in his freedom." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!" - Louise Bogan
"To be human is to long for something more, something beyond us. Fulfillment, peace, and lasting happiness, for no apparent reason, seem to have evaded us. We believe that we are meant for happiness and made for joy. Pain and suffering are somehow a mistake that should not be part of life." - Joe Boot
"To change the conditions that allow war, oppression, and mass suffering, we must change the thinking that has allowed the conditions to be present.”" - Gregg Braden
"It is in suffering that we are withdrawn from the bright superficial film of existence, from the sway of time and mere things, and find ourselves in the presence of a profounder truth." - Yves Congar, fully Yves Marie-Joseph Congar
"To my mind, there are two things that, in life, you can do about death. Either you can choose to ignore it, in which case you may have some success in making the idea of it go away for a limited period of time, or you can confront the prospect of your own death and try to analyze it and, in so doing, try to minimize some of the inevitable suffering that it causes. Neither way can you actually overcome it." -
"No suffering befalls the man who calls nothing his own." - Dhammapada NULL
"A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man." - Gustave Flaubert
"Do we not learn from suffering? Yes, often; and some people will learn only in that way; but we still learn by overcoming and not by encouraging or accepting the negative thing. The man who accepts his trouble “with resignation” is not learning; he is steeping himself in more error." - Emmet Fox
"We compound our suffering by victimizing each other." - Athol Fugard, born Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard
"The history of mankind is crowded with evidences proving that physical coercion is not adapted to moral regeneration; that the sinful dispositions of men can be subdued only by love; that evil can be exterminated from the earth only by goodness… that there is great security in being gentle, harmless, long-suffering, and abundant in mercy; that it is only the meek who shall inherit the earth, for the violent, who resort to the sword, are destined to perish with the sword." - William Lloyd Garrison
"What is the greatest evil of suffering? Not the suffering itself but our rebellion against it, the state of interior revolt which so often accompanies it." - Jean Grou, fully Jean Nicholas Grou
"Suffering is not the point of living. It’s the background, the context, against which we discover love’s power over death, over illness. Suffering is what lends love its supremacy over death." - Allan J Hamilton
"If the goal of life is to do the very best one can do at each unfolding moment of existence, then, through spiritual work, one has already escaped the primary cause of suffering. In the stop-frame of the radical present, there is no life story to react to or edit. With this one-pointedness of mind, it soon becomes obvious that everything merely `is as it is’ without comment or adjectives. The illusion of `Now’ is replaced by the reality of `Always’." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
"A person cannot be religious and indifferent to other human beings’ plight and suffering." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"In visions of wisdom, in devotion to the good, in submission to beauty, and when overwhelmed by the holy, we awake to behold existence in this relationship. In reverence, suffering, and humility we discover our existence and find the bridge that leads from existence to God. And this is religion." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"No individual or people can achieve anything without industry, suffering and sacrifice." - Fatima Jinna, also known as Madr-e-Millat, mother of the nation
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"We have mistaken our abstractions for concrete realities… The enormous success of the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand matter with its simple location in space and time, on the other hand mind, perceiving, suffering, reasoning, but not interfering, has foisted onto philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact. Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists who accept matter and mind on an equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind into matter and those who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century." - John Locke
"Nine-tenths of our suffering is caused by others not thinking so much of us as we think they ought." - Mary Lyon, fully Mary Mason Lyon
"The cause of all suffering is rooted in desire. If the desire is extinguished suffering has no foot hold." - Mahāyāna Religious Ideal "Great Vehicle" NULL
"Religion, like everything great and noble and demanding within us, increases the tension in mankind; and together with the tension, suffering; and with the suffering, spiritual effort; and with the spiritual effort, joy." - Jacques Maritain
"Our life is not a problem to be solved, it is a gift to be opened… If we are preoccupied with what is missing and what is broken and wrong, we lose the miraculous harvest of all these tiny gifts, piled on upon the other, that accumulate without our acknowledging them. If we listen more carefully for the infinite blessings of a single day, this will not discount or obliterate our sorrows. But it will help us remember how strong and rich we can be, even in the midst of suffering." - Wayne Muller
"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." - Zen Proverbs and Thoughts
"Neither power nor wealth, neither education nor ability, neither gifts of creativity nor stores of human energy can insure against the reality that suffering will be our companion at some time during our journey. It is a presence as inseparable from the human condition as food and oxygen are from human life. It is part of our legacy." - Paula Ripple, fully Paula Ripple Comin
"It is not easy to accept the premise that one of life’s basic conditions is inescapable suffering, truth though this proves to be." - Nancy Wilson Ross
"The Buddha, that is now “Awakened One,” diagnosed the human condition in the following way. Life is out of balance and characterized by suffering because all things are impermanent, and yet we desire things as if they were permanent. We each view our own self as if it too were permanent and completely independent from our selves, and so we think of our self as competing for those things with other discrete selves. Everything that we desire will ultimately pass away – we cannot hold on to anything in the end, not even our own bodies and minds – so our inappropriate desires are frustrated and we suffer, only to be reborn again into anew life of desire and suffering. To break the cycle of rebirth (samsara), we must overcome our ignorance about the true nature of things, cut the root of desire, and give up attachment to self, for we are anatman, no-self." - Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin
"Two perceptions cast their shadow over my existence. One consists in my realization that the world is inexplicably mysterious and full of suffering; the other, in the fact that I have been born into a period of spiritual decadence in mankind." - Albert Schweitzer