Carrying Burden Quotes & Sayings

The burden you are carrying around is the burden of self. You seek release from that. You want to let it all go. You want to forget who you are and what you are. You wish to be the whole universe, infinite, endless. — Frederick Lenz

It is impossible to go as high as you are capable of going, if you are carrying the burden of hate, revenge and bitterness. — Zig Ziglar

Forgiveness. It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody. You are relieved of carrying that burden of resentment. You really are lighter. You feel lighter. You just drop that. — Maya Angelou

Sometimes carrying the burden of an upsetting truth, and hiding it, is actually a gift you give to someone else. You bear that burden, so they don't have to, in a situation where telling them will change nothing. — Cassandra Clare

How can we drop negativity, as you suggest? By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that you don't want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and then letting go of it. — Eckhart Tolle

It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelings of love, fear, and hopefulness that his brother's escape inspired. It was the drawing of Harry Houdini, taking a calm cup of tea in the middle of the sky, that Thimas had made in his notebook during his abortive career as a librettist. Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him. — Michael Chabon

I compare the troubles which we have to undergo in the course of the year to a great bundle of sticks, far too large for us to lift. But God does not require us to carry the whole at once. He mercifully unties the bundle, and gives us first one stick, which we are to carry today, and then another, which we are to carry tomorrow, and so on. This we might easily manage, if we would only take the burden appointed for us each day; but we choose to increase our troubles by carrying yesterday's stick over again today, and adding tomorrow's burden to our load, before we are required to bear it. — John Newton

If your work becomes a source of enjoyment and a challenge, it will never seem like work - it will be fun. If you ever feel that your work is a burden, there is no point carrying on with it. — Kapil Dev

Let's stop judging others, and relieve them of the heavy burden they are carrying on their shoulders because of us. — Saurabh Sharma

Our natural tendency is to judge and condemn others. But here we find that, because of the cross we've been freed from God's curse and liberated as sons and daughters. We are now free to humble ourselves and walk along with someone who is erring, even if they've sinned in a way that may be very terrible. When you bear each other's burdens, what you are carrying is the burden of the other person's sin. What motivates you is your compassion. You come alongside the sinner, not trying to crush them, but putting your arm around him or her as much as you can, as if to say, "Jesus loves you, so do I, and we want you to know this. — C. John Miller

Bent double, groaning with the weight, an old lame Indian was carrying on his back, by means of a strap looped over his forehead, another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than himself. He carried the older man and his crutches, trembling in every limb under this weight of the past, he carried both their burdens. — Malcolm Lowry

Haul, v.: Yes, love will bend you over, make you strain. That is the burden of having something worth carrying forward. — David Levithan

We talk a bit, until Tess is sufficiently calm, and then I take her upstairs and see her snuggled back into bed with Cyclops and one of Maura's romance novels. Strange bedfellows, but both seem to comfort her, and it serves to remind me again that she is a strange mix of woman and child, carrying a burden far too heavy for her. — Jessica Spotswood

Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences. — Aleksandar Hemon

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden. — Harold Bloom

The moral of the story, Son," Pun would say, "is Don't take more on your heart than you can shake off on your heels."
Of all lessons, that one I never learned and I hope I never do. My heart daily grows new foliage, always adding people, picking up new heartaches like a wool coat collects cockleburs and beggar's-lice seeds. It gets fuller and fuller as I walk slow as a sloth, carrying all the pain Pun and Frank and so many others tried to walk from. Especially the pain of the lost forest. Sometimes there is no leaving, no looking westward for another promised land. We have to nail our shoes to the kitchen floor and unload the burden of our heart. We have to set to the task of repairing the damage done by and to us. — Janisse Ray

Think of the most discouraging thing that you are currently carrying or the biggest project you can't seem to tackle. Forget about how it happened, forget about how you got there, just look at the clock, and before that number changes, do one little thing to make it better. After you do, enjoy your moment of victory, and then do it again. In less than the time it takes you to blink, the past will burden you no more. — Dan Pearce

The Blacks was a white foreigner's idea of a people he did not understand. Genet had superimposed the meanness and cruelty of his own people onto a race he had never known, a race already nearly doubled over carrying the white man's burden of greed and guilt, and which at the same time toted its own insufficiency. I threw the manuscript into a closet, finished with Genet and his narrow little conclusions. Max — Maya Angelou

You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing that you can do now. — Eckhart Tolle

Black women are supposed to be 'strong,' but the burden of carrying our race and carrying our families adds the pressure. — Aunjanue Ellis

Pain was a peculiar thing. It made me feel strange; it made me retreat. I felt that my relationships to other people had changed in certain ways. I was carrying around a burden that only a few people knew about. It made me feel apart from most people, as if I could see them, but they were a long way away. People were going about their normal lives, and now I carried about with me all the time pain, as if pain were my child. We — Paulette Bates Alden

The freedom of saying anything to him, telling all, relieved a burden I hadn't even realized I'd been carrying. In my relentless push to keep moving forward, there had been so many emotions I hadn't let myself inhabit fully, so many things I hadn't talked about. Now I couldn't quite catch up to myself. — Lisa Kleypas

None of us move on without a backward look. We move on always carrying with us those we have lost. What we aim to do in our little group is ensure that carrying them is not a burden, something that feels impossible to bear, a weight keeping us stuck in the same place. We want their presence to feel like a gift. — Jojo Moyes

Carrying a grudge is a heavy burden. As you forgive, you will feel the joy of being forgiven. — Henry B. Eyring

Playing with them was boring, and it wasn't even their fault. It was just the notion of playing itself. She had never gotten the hang of it, even when she was a child. You needed to be able to adopt a personality other than your own in order to fully immerse yourself in the world of play, and it was burden enough carrying her own self around. — Jami Attenberg

The chess world is obligated to organize a match between the champion of the world and the winner of this Carlsbad tournament - indeed, this is a moral obligation. If the world of chess should remain deaf to its obligation, on the other hand, it would amount to an absolutely unforgivable omission, carrying with it a heavy burden of guilt. — Aron Nimzowitsch

Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses - always under cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking - chickens pumped full of hormones that left them too big to walk - and he thought how these same chickens might return from their destination as pieces of meat to the floodlit Bojangles' up the hill from his house, and that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose hatred of the job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up and eaten by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro with diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and later Dean would see them riding around the Mayodan Wal-Mart in electric carts because they were too heavy to walk the aisles of a Supercenter, just like hormone-fed chickens. — George Packer

Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations. — James Madison

Or is it the case that no one gets over anything? Is there really that much pain and suffering continuing right now at this minute, in millions of hearts, in bodies carrying on the burden of existence, trying to smile through tears for fleeting, passing moments here and there-when they can forget what happened to them, maybe even for whole hours at a time? Maybe that's what it is to live. — Koethi Zan

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to do work well and in a healthy way without using my work as a way to define myself. Jesus says his load is easy and his burden is light, but he doesn't say there isn't a load or a burden. He recognizes there is something to carry but he invites us into the easy way of carrying it. — Emily P. Freeman

So young and yet already carrying a great burden on her shoulders. Do not worry, my dear, I will make sure you can protect yourself and others. Because you are our hope ... sweet, darling ... Arima. — Stephanie Beerden

To live charitably means not looking out for our own interests, but carrying the burdens of the weakest and poorest among us. — Pope Francis

I winced. "I shouldn't have said that." "You once put goose droppings in my shoes, Alina. A bad mood I can handle." He glanced at me and said, "We all know the burden you're carrying. You don't have to bear it alone." I — Leigh Bardugo

How sad, ye Gods, how sad the world is at evening, how mysterious the mists over the swamps! You will know it when you have wandered astray in those mists, when you have suffered greatly before dying, when you have walked through the world carrying an unbearable burden. You know it too when you are weary and ready to leave this earth without regret; its mists; its swamps and its rivers; ready to give yourself into the arms of death with a light heart, knowing that death alone can comfort you. — Mikhail Bulgakov

The rich are like beasts of burden, carrying treasure all day, and at the night of death unladen; they carry to their grave only the bruises and marks of their toil. — Saint Augustine

The first step to be a good man is this: You must deeply feel the burden of the stones someone else carrying. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

In writing non-fiction about people who are living, you are always walking a fine line, carrying a burden to be fair that, in my opinion, should always be there. — Jonathan Coleman

If we can forgive everyone, regardless of what he or she may have done, we nourish the soul and allow our whole being to feel good. To hold a grudge against anyone is like carrying the devil on your shoulders. It is our willingness to forgive and forget that casts away such a burden and brings light into our hearts, freeing us from many ill feelings against our fellow human beings. — Sydney Banks

Some people act as if there were a penalty for carrying concealed troubles. They exhibit them at every opportunity, begging for sympathy, even condescending to accept pity. Such persons never realize that the very ones to whom they are complaining are often struggling under a burden greater than their own. — Alice Hegan Rice

ZIGZAG, v.t. To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man's burden. — Ambrose Bierce

He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out it was the former that had condemned me. — Albert Camus

He had a carrying, congressional sort of voice, the kind that sounded good saying things like Less of a tax burden on the middle class and Thank you for your donation and Honey, could you bring me my sweater with the duck on it? — Maggie Stiefvater

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the Coarch and Horses, more dead than alive as it seemed, and flung his portmanteau down. "A fire," he cried, "in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!" He stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a ready acquiescence to terms and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn. — H.G.Wells

I stood beside the U-Haul, and I just watched her. I stared at her while she looked on with the saddest look in her eyes. I wanted to know what she was thinking about, what was going on in her head. What had mad her so sad? I wanted to hug her so bad. When she finally got out of the U-Haul and I introduced myself to her, it took all I had to let go of her hand. I wanted to hold on to it forever. I wanted to let her know that she wasn't alone. Whatever burden it was that she was carrying around, I wanted to carry it for her. I wish I could, Lake. I wish I could take it all away. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. It doesn't just go away. — Colleen Hoover

I've wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but I still love life. That ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most pernicious inclinations. What could be more stupid than to persist in carrying a burden that we constantly want to cast off, to hold our existence in horror, yet cling to it nonetheless, to fondle the serpent that devours us, until it has eaten our heart? — Voltaire

Whatever burden it was that she was carrying around, I wanted to carry it for her. — Colleen Hoover

Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind. — Gautama Buddha

A family of four needs to transport around 200 pounds of water each and every day to meet its most minimal drinking, cooking, and cleaning needs. To manage such an impossible weight, two trips to the well each day by mother and children are not uncommon. Carrying water for basic subsistence devours school time for children and places a dispiriting burden on the enterprising will of parents to struggle out of their material privation. That the water carrying falls traditionally on women adds the insult of gender inequity to the tragedy. — Steven Solomon

As for the young man carrying the groceries, he was a thin, fair-skinned young man, and I would have said that he had been born in the house. He had the vacant, dog-like expressions that house-born slaves, as I remembered, liked to put on when they were in public with their masters and performing some simple task. This fellow was pretending that the Waitrose groceries were a great burden, but this was just an act, to draw attention to himself and the lady he served. He, too, had mistaken me for an Arab, and when we crossed he had dropped the burdened-down expression and given me a look of wistful inquisitiveness, like a puppy that wanted to play but had just been made to understand that it wasn't playtime. — V.S. Naipaul

Intelligence is a burden not many are willing or able to carry. — Darnell Lamont Walker

For can anything be sillier than to insist on carrying a burden one would continually much rather throw to the ground? — Voltaire

If there's a new idea, a new invention, or a new gas, or a new whatever you know, It should be brought at least into the open instead of carrying these same old burdens around with you. — Jimi Hendrix

How can you become old in spirit? Only by carrying the past, isn't it? If you carry sixty years of burden with you, you're sixty years old. If you don't carry anything, you're like a newborn. The physical body may develop limitations, but the way you are has no limitations. It simply has no limitations. You are this many years old or that many years old simply because you carry that many years of garbage with you. — Jaggi Vasudev

It is difficult to soar to your destiny carrying the burden of doubt, impossible to soar to your destiny carrying the burden of fear, but conceivable to soar to your destiny carried by the wings of faith. — Matshona Dhliwayo

There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy. — Vikram Seth

Jeez, it was a lot of pressure to put on a kid. I was carrying the burden of my race, you know? I was going to get a bad back from it. — Sherman Alexie

Stolid pack-animals are much more fit for carrying loads than thoroughbred horses: who ever subdued their noble speed with a heavy burden? — Seneca.

Be respected as being new, and probably a decent change or a help for the human race or whatever, instead of keep carrying the same old burdens around with you. — Jimi Hendrix

But he holds me so tightly that for a moment, the emotions are at bay. The sadness and fear, the regret and the loathing. He bottles them up inside his arms so that for a split second I don't have to be the one carrying the weight of them. For this moment, the burden is his. — Mary Kubica

What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves. — Tobias Wolff

Each day is a miracle that intoxicates me. I want more. I greet every morning like a new pleasure. And yet I am keenly aware of all life's artifices. Getting dressed, wearing make-up, laughing, having fun-isn't all that just playing a role? Am I not more profound, carrying the burden of those twenty years when I 'wasn't alive', than all those who rushed around in vain during that time? — Malika Oufkir

Stress is not about carrying the burden yourself but, failure to set your priorities straight". — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one's very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away? — Voltaire

So how does she know?
If you stay, I'll do whatever you want. I'll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I'll do that, too. Maybe coming back to your old life would just be too painful, maybe it'd be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I'd do it. I can lose you like that if I don't lose you today. I'll let you go. If you stay.
That was my vow. And it's been my secret. My burden. My shame. That I asked her to stay. That she listened ...
I wasn't about to tell her about the promise I'd made. A promise that in the end, I was forced to keep.
But she knew.
No wonder she hates me.
In a weird way, it's a relief. I'm so tired of carrying this secret around. I'm so tired of feeling bad for making her live and feeling angry at her for living without me and feeling like a hypocrite for the whole mess. — Gayle Forman

And as the Baudelaires told Hector their long story, they began to feel as if the handyman was carrying more than their suitcases. They felt as if he was carrying each word they said, as if each unfortunate event was a burden that Hector was helping them with. The story of their lives was so miserable that I cannot say they felt happy when they were through telling it, but by the time Sunny concluded the whole long story, the Baudelaires felt as if they were carrying much less. — Lemony Snicket

It's true across the U.K. that those who had least to do with causing the economic crisis are carrying the heaviest burden. That's unacceptable. — Johann Lamont

With each word that passes my lips, I feel less heavy. It is as if I am giving him sentences made of stones, and the more I relay, the more of the burden he is carrying. — Jodi Picoult

She was aware of the two men in the room, both of them carrying their burden of history, their charms and flaws, their heaviness and guilt, for no adult was ever really without guilt of some sort. — Nancy Thayer

If your judgement is clouded, you must be carrying too many things which are being a burden to you. — Yoko Ono

I submit my tongue as an instrument of righteousness when I make it bless them that curse me and pray for them who persecute me, even though it "automatically" tends to strike and wound those who have wounded me. I submit my legs to God as instruments of righteousness when I engage them in physical labor as service, perhaps carrying a burden the "second mile" for someone whom I would rather let my legs kick. I submit my body to righteousness when I do my good deeds without letting them be known, though my whole frame cries out to strut and crow. — Dallas Willard