I will lamely apologize for my long absence by begging off an elective surgery and painful recovery. That being the case, just now I seem curious to find what-all the world might have to say regarding pain…
Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
– Samuel Johnson, Life of Johnson
Perhaps the innocence of the adult, where it is achieved, is greater than the innocence of a child, though bought at the cost of much painful awareness.
– Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
We are burnt in the cold treasures of separation.
– Poetry world, the memory of Ghaznavi
Complete misery is always self-induced.
– Proctor Charlie
Being uncomfortable is not the same as being unsafe.
– Mike Anderer
Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Why does full consciousness always include the mysterious capacity for misery as well as for happiness?
– Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism
When bad behaviors become habits, the worst outcomes become inevitabilities.
– Elliot Ackerman, The Fifth Act
What we often seek in perfection is freedom from the discomfort of making mistakes. In return we trade our curiosity, our flexibility, and the room to grow.
– Momen
What does a storm know of sorrow?
– Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
We would much rather be angry than sad.
– Richard Rohr, The Gift of Tears
We who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.
– Joseph Conrad, Chance
We were not born to survive, only to live.
– William Stanley Merwin, The River of Bees
We don’t tend to see the truth as something that could set us free because it means embracing pain, acknowledging our differences and conflicts, taking our real situation into account.
– Kathleen Norris, Dakota
Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.
– G.K. Chesterton, A Piece of Chalk
Violence has a long tail.
– Elliot Ackerman, The Fifth Act
Truth tastes nasty.
– Elizabeth Tervo, Hilde and the Bad Poets
To exist is to survive unfair choices.
– Ruby Rae Spiegel, The OA Way
They breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
– William Shakespeare, King Richard II
There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently.
– William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
There is no life without pain, just as there is no art without submitting to chaos.
– Rita Mae Brown
There are truths that can be discovered only through suffering or from the critical vantage point of extreme situations.
– Ignacio Martin-Baro
There are griefs which leave the poet without words.
– Proctor Charlie
There are always places to go further down.
– Neil Gaiman, American Gods
There [is] no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears [bear] witness that a man [has] the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
The truth, the whole truth, tends to be complex, its contentments and joys wrestled out of doubt, pain, change.
– Kathleen Norris, Dakota
The same substances that take the edge off anxiety and pain also dull our sense of observation.
– Brene Brown, Atlas of the Heart
The only comparison which we make of ourselves to the finite is painful to us.
– Blaise Pascal, Pensees
The ocean is always incomplete, just like the sky, just like the rain, and so in all those things lie an impossible yearning.
– Umair Haque, A Book of Nights
The more our lives go on, the more the forge contained in our soul hammers out chains.
– Andreas Karkavitsas, The Archeologist
The iron forged on the anvil cannot be blamed for the hammer.
– Terry Pratchett, Dodger
The impossible is what men get from events — and often at its most unwelcome.
– A.J.P. Taylor, Trotsky
The higher the love the greater the pain.
– Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead
The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.
– Lord Byron
The energy of evil is so much more forcible than the energy of good.
– Joseph Conrad, Chance
The enemy isn’t pain; it’s fear of pain.
– Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know
The dark past is the greatest possession you have-the key to life and happiness for others.
– Bill Wilson, Alcoholics Anonymous
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
– J. K. Galbraith
The comic when it is human becomes quickly painful.
– Joseph Conrad, Chance
That to be fully alive you have to be willing to bear pain.
– Vandana Singh, Requiem
Suffering will only be removed by wisdom, not by drenching it in sunshine or attempting to bury it in a dark basement.
– Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations
Suffering opens the channel through which all of life flows and by which all creation breathes, and I still do not know why.
– Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water
Suffering cannot wipe away the heart’s smile.
– William Paul Young, The Divine Dance (forward)
Sometimes God’s economy seems severe.
– Brother Them, Wrestling with Iggy
Screaming was no kind of kindly neighbor.
– Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things
Reason is no match for pain.
– John-Henry Butterworth, Nine Perfect Strangers.
Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.
– C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Poverty is a thing created by that which is called civilized life.
– Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice
People don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
– Anthony de Mello, Awareness
Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns.
– Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Only those who have tried breathing under water know how imporant breathing really is, and will never take it for granted again.
– Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water
Only the living know what loss means.
– Lucy Kaplansky, Booklyn Train
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love.
– Sophocles
No soldier was ever ashamed of his scars.
– Benjamin Paul Blood, Optimism
Misery is not inevitable.
– Arthur C. Brooks, Your Professionl Decline is Coming (much) Sooner Than You Think
Men think they are better than grass.
– William Stanley Merwin, The River of Bees
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure’s smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain; these mixed with art, and to due bounds confined, make and maintain the balance of the mind.
– Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
Love runs best when it seems to break down.
– Thomas Merton, Eighteen Poems
Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.
– Otto von Bismarck
Life is an accommodation to life in exile.
– Terry Chapman
Life is a tragedy when seen in closeup, But a comedy in longshot
– Charlie Chaplin
Letting go of a sure thing is the only way to get something better.
– Isaiah Hankel, How to Beat Fear of Failure and Take Calculated Risks
Just because we can use the noise of the world to block out the discomfort of dealing with ourselves doesn’t mean that this discomfort goes away.
– Zat Rana, The Most Important Skill Nobody Taught You
It seems to me that if you can’t ever admit to being a wretch, you haven’t been paying attention.
– Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace
It is only among humanity that we find a natural tendency toward abnormality.
– Proctor Charlie
It is most blessed for man to be taken from pain, more than pain to be taken from man.
– Julian of Norwich, Showings
It is hard to rule and wisdom can be painful.
– Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning
Internal warfare is our normal state.
– Doug Frank, A Gentler God
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
If I were dead, I don’t think I’d have this blinding headache.
– Terry Nation, Blake’s 7: Aftermath
If heartaches were commercials we’d all be on TV.
– John Prine, Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard
I never want to be too busy for the person in pain. That goes double if I happen to be that busy person.
– Proctor Charlie
I hope when I die I start feeling good about myself.
– Tom Clayton
Hope is that virtue which implies a deficiency in strength as well as a sense of loneliness.
– Brother Them
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
– Samuel Johnson, Anecdotes of the RVD Percival Stockdale
He who learns must suffer.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Grief is the price we pay for loving and we gladly pay the price.
– Paul Mariani, Thirty Days
God loves rock bottom.
– Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway
For some reason, which I have yet to understand, beauty hurts.
– Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water
Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought that I will feel less?
– C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Donne was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies.
– Neil Gaiman, American Gods
For all the senseless phenomena of our existence, and the most senseless most of all, are susceptible of investigation. Not completely, but sufficiently to spare one painful questions.
– Franz Kafka, Investigations of a Dog
For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we’re a bit broken.
– Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace
Do human beings really like being happy?
– C.S.Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Discomfort is a sign that we are being stretched into new territory.
– Christine Valters Painter, The Soul’s Slow Ripening
Delivery is only real when pain and suffering are real.
– Brother Them, Wrestling with Iggy
Bones mend. Regret stays with you forever.
– Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
Better to have pain and pleasure in some intensity than to have a lukewarm sensation between them.
– Benjamin Paul Blood, Optimism
Being able to see what’s coming doesn’t make it any less painful when it arrives.
– Brene Brown, Atlas of the Heart
And the seasons, they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down–we’re captives on a carousel of time.
– Joni Mitchell, The Circle Game
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
[People] would rather be unhappy for ten years than be uncertain about their future for ten minutes.
– Isaiah Hankel, How to Beat Fear of Failure and Take Calculated Risks
If you have read all the way down to here, I hope you are feeling a little less pain.