Unnecessary Pain Quotes & Sayings

The amount of suffering you actually can feel, you want to be able to do something about it. You want to be able to attend to it, to change the system that is making this happen. Because you are so aware of how unnecessary it is, and therein lies the deeper pain. — Caroline Myss

Pain is a teacher, as I have told you before. Most people fear it. We do not. We would never stop a child from touching a burning piece of wood. We would warn, but never prevent. Wisdom comes through listening to those with more experience. Only fools blunder through unnecessary pain. — Jeff Wheeler

And with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all. — Anton Chekhov

Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands. — Bell Hooks

He suspected that any life form that inflicted unnecessary pain tended to find its consciousness eroding. Without consciousness to reflect back upon life, all life might lose its sense of purpose. — Frank Herbert

Looking at suicide - the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind - is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths — Kay Redfield Jamison

Without the reference points of pleasure and pain, people invent imaginary and abstract standards for ethics that are divorced from reality and generate vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. Pleasure is the only real ethical guide. It returns our conversations about ethics to the natural context where these conversations belong: the well-being of sentient beings. — Hiram Crespo

You are human, you will make mistakes, and it's one of the most beautiful things about being human, but you must learn from your mistakes, otherwise your life will have a lot of unnecessary pain. — Rhonda Byrne

Pain is annoying and unnecessary, like getting an e-mail in all caps. It's like a six-year-old who alerts you every fifteen seconds that he wants Hungry Hungry Hippos for his birthday. Yes, I understand. Message received. — A. J. Jacobs

I always asked for forgiveness for my sins right away but I never accepted it until I felt right that I had suffered enough to pay for it. God revealed to me what I was doing how much unnecessary pain I was causing myself. He even showed me that what I was doing was an insult to Jesus that in essence I was saying Lord the sacrifice of Your life and blood was good but not good enough. I must add my work of feeling guilty before I can be forgiven. — Joyce Meyer

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the 'freedom' of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretences. Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. Both — John Berger

God loves and cares for creation and has the right to expect this loving care be replicated by humans. Creation exists, not for the glory of humanity, but for the glory of God. God has the right to see that earthly creatures are free to live according to their nature and without unnecessary abuse, exploitation, and pain, so that their lives can glorify their Creator. ... [S]ince God values and cares for all creation, creation has a derived right to be valued and cared for by humans for God's glory. — Richard A. Young

Any mode of thought that lays out complete and final answers to great existential questions is liable to dogmatism. A great attraction of care ethics, I think, is its refusal to encode or construct a catalog of principles and rules. One who cares must meet the cared-for just as he or she is, as a whole human being with individual needs and interests. [...] At most, it directs us to attend, to listen, and to respond as positively as possible. [...] it recognizes that virtually all human beings desire not to be hurt, and this gives us something close to an absolute: We should not inflict deliberate hurt or pain. Even when we must fight to save our children, we must not inflict unnecessary or deliberate pain. — Nel Noddings

Politeness only teaches us to save others from unnecessary pain ... You are not bound by politeness to tell any falsehoods. — Maria Edgeworth

Everyone agrees that animals should not be exposed to unnecessary pain. But neither should scientists be hamstrung by the requirement to use anesthesia in every animal experiment that might cause pain. — Timothy Noah

The commander must be at constant pains to keep his troops abreast of all the latest tactical experience and developments, and must insist on their practical application. He must see to it that his subordinates are trained in accordance with the latest requirements. The best form of welfare for the troops is first-class training, for this saves unnecessary casualties. — Erwin Rommel

The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed ... But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't. Either way, we're for it. — C.S. Lewis

Civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain ... those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men. — Harold Laski

Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering - unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain. — Samuel Johnson

Through spiritual maturity you will see new ways to avoid unnecessary suffering; wiser ways to endure unavoidable hardships with grace, and opportunities to turn your pain into lessons of service and healing for others. — Bryant McGill

Pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being that suffers is not a member of our own species. — Peter Singer

Time made apologies and absolution unnecessary. Time didn't really heal, it just made bad memories distant so that the brain couldn't recapture the lost pain — Amulya Malladi

People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been
for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy. — Ayn Rand

1. Live now. Be concerned with the present rather than with past or future.
2. Live here. Deal with what is present rather than with what is absent.
3. Stop imagining. Experience the real.
4. Stop unnecessary thinking. Rather, taste and see.
5. Express rather than manipulate, explain, justify, or judge.
6. Give in to unpleasantness and pain just as to pleasure. Do not restrict your awareness.
7. Accept no should or ought other than your own. Adore no graven image.
8. Take full responsibility for your actions, feelings, and thoughts.
9. Surrender to being as you are. — Claudio Naranjo

While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope. — Timothy Keller

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. — Eckhart Tolle

It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist. — Alexander Lowen

But pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being — Peter Singer

We ... must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is. — Gary Snyder

Those who suffer intolerably learn to hide their afflictions, both necessary and unnecessary, because the world does not run on pain time but on happy time, whether or not that happiness is honestly felt or a mask for the blackest despondency. — Thomas Ligotti

Is it intelligent to make ourselves miserable while living in the past, haunted by memories while being inexorably swallowed by them? Whenever we reminisce about our past life, we are advised in our tradition to be in a state of gratefulness. Be mindful of nurturing unnecessary grief and staying stuck in old pain. — Hiram Crespo

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain. It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o'clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness. The point is that in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness. Could we just settle down and have some — Pema Chodron