Suffering Is Essential Quotes & Sayings

Pain is painful but an essential ingredient of life. Suffering is optional. — Debasish Mridha

Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways. — Pico Iyer

Nothing suffers annihilation, but at dissolution there is a change, and things fall back to the essential element in which they were before. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

One should pray to God not for the alleviation of suffering, but for peace of mind. Once you have peace of mind, your problems will vanish. You can even escape the consequences of your actions, if you have God's Grace. After the expiry date, a medicine loses its potency. Similarly, if you acquire God's Grace, the consequences of your actions will have no effect on you. In order to bring your consequences to expiry, prayer is essential. You have to pray wholeheartedly. — Publications Division

Finding a way to extend forgiveness to ourselves is one of our most essential tasks. Just as others have been caught in suffering, so have we. If we look honestly at our life, we can see the sorrows and pain that have led to our own wrongdoing. In this we can finally extend forgiveness to ourselves; we can hold the pain we have caused in compassion. Without such mercy, we will live our own life in exile. — Jack Kornfield

Suffering is an essential component of life. No person escapes suffering, which is indivisible from life itself. Suffering is what places in in contact with the self; it is what allows us to understand the spiritual nature behind our existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

To restore the human subject at the centre - the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject - we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a 'who' as well as a 'what', a real person, a patient, in relation to disease - in relation to the physical.
The patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient's personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined. — Oliver Sacks

To Amma, all are Her children. In Amma's eyes no defect of Her children is serious. But when She is considered as the guru, it is essential for the growth of the disciples that they conduct themselves according to the tradition. Amma will pardon all the mistakes of Her children, but nature has certain laws. That is what brings punishment for our sins. Children, we should be able to take any sorrow or suffering as conducive for our growth. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced - consciousness - and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next. — W.G. Sebald

Suffering is essential for the elimination of the ego, just as it was necessary for you to scrub and scrub in order to wash the stain from my coat. — Meher Baba

The reason Scripture doesn't give clear guidelines for assigning responsibility is that it is not essential for us to know precise causes. This is good news: you don't have to know the exact cause of suffering in order to find hope and comfort. — Edward T. Welch

The essential religion is taking the whole responsibility for whatsoever you are. And immediately an insight arises: 'If I am responsible for my suffering, then it is simple, I can drop it. It is my choice. I will not choose it any more.' — Rajneesh

Part of me knows that prayer is essential; another part of me would rather turn on the TV and check out. And that whole bit about being long-suffering-no way. Part of me wants to just get drunk. — John Eldredge

The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reigns supreme. — Pope Benedict XVI

Suffering, if you're a Christian, suffering is a part of life. And it's not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life There are all different ways to suffer. One way to suffer is through lack of food and shelter and there's another way to suffer which is lack of dignity and hope and there's all sorts of ways that people suffer and it's not just tangible, it's also intangible and we have to consider both. — Rick Santorum

Knowing how to suffer well is essential to realizing true happiness. SUFFERING — Thich Nhat Hanh

But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever. — John Wyndham

What is essential in the life of a man of my kind is what he thinks and how he thinks, and not what he does or suffers. — Albert Einstein

We can learn from him that suffering and the gift of himself is an essential gift we need in our time. — Pope Benedict XVI

Control is an illusion - a fact you will learn very fast if you become ill, or have things fall apart in some other way. When we understand vulnerability and suffering as an essential part of being human, our individual fate can be easier to manage. — Harriet Lerner

Spirituality is nothing more than the art of paying attention. When I give my whole heart and mind to a task such as singing - life's worry, suffering, or conflicts don't exist in that moment. Additionally, singing is about breath work, which is the most essential practice to living a conscious & healthy life. — Jason Mraz

It is essential that you follow your own idea of passion, even if to others it looks like suffering. — Bryant McGill

The question is not how can I overcome fear? The question is: how can I use it creatively? If you have problems (and we all do), how are you going to deal with them? To be is to be imperfect. Contentment is resiliency, the willingness and the ability to see the opportunities presented by mistakes. Take what you like and pay for it - failure is the price you pay for success. It is the wages of growth. Success is failing forwards, figuring out how to conduct suffering, and in its reconstruction to transform it into illumination. Eschew impatience. Let stillness teach you where your centre is, where your origins are. Be impeccable in all your dealings with the world. Integrity isn't a luxury - it's an essential. Remember the best advice of the I Ching: perseverance furthers. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

In this way Byron's take on the human condition becomes closer to the fractured collage of 20th century existentialists: a conflicted human nature posited within a harsh and painful environment where self-less compassion is essential to human progress, but is rewarded with torture and suffering. — George Gordon Byron

Grace is that ability; to face adversity and be at ease, to enter into the suffering world and help others without losing yourself in the process. It is to be true to your most essential nature, and produce something good from that. To have grace is as close as we may come to perfection. — Christopher Daniel Mechling

Life's pressure is equal to your resistance. Your grief has endless time. Your sadness is bottomless. Your worries are relentless. Your resentment is unquenchable. Your fears are unmovable. Every dimension of your suffering will instruct you, until you have learned your essential lessons. — Bryant McGill

To answer the question, what makes a tragedy, is to answer the question wherein lies the essential significance of life, what the dignity of humanity depends upon in the last analysis. Here the tragedians speak to us with no uncertain voice. The great tragedies themselves offer the solution to the problem they propound. It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows. Endow them with a greater or as great a potentiality of pain and our foremost place in the world would no longer be undisputed. Deep down, when we search out the reason for our conviction of the transcendent worth of each human being, we know that it is because of the possibility that each can suffer so terribly. What do outside trappings matter, Zenith or Elsinore? Tragedy's preoccupation is with suffering. But, — Edith Hamilton

I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?
— Clarice Lispector

A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him. — Eugene Ionesco

Suffering in the path of Christian obedience, with joy - because the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life (Psalm 63:3) - is the clearest display of the worth of God in our lives. Therefore, faith-filled suffering is essential in this world for the most intense, authentic worship. When we are most satisfied with God in suffering, he will be most glorified in us in worship. Our problem is not styles of music. Our problem is styles of life. When we embrace more affliction for the worth of Christ, there will be more fruit in the worship of Christ. — John Piper

Confidence is a life ingredient that is essential to success and wholeness. It is perhaps the single most important trait that enables seemingly average people to do and become all that they can. And the good news is - it can be learned. No one has to suffer a lifetime of low confidence. — Steve Goodier

I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence [sic] in myself that could make it that possible [sic], and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not renunciation. — F Scott Fitzgerald

To endure the cross is not a tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. When it comes, it is not an accident, but a necessity. It is not the sort of suffering which is inseparable from this mortal life, but the suffering which is an essential part of the specifically Christian life. It is not suffering per se but suffering-and-rejection, and not rejection for any cause or conviction of our own, but rejection for the sake of Christ. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is essential to institute a legal framework that would ensure justice and improve the quality of life in Burma immediately, because the greatest suffering among the people at the moment is caused by lack of justice and lack of the rule of law. — Aung San Suu Kyi