Quotes about Suffering

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.

The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world's value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.

When Niebuhr thought a little more deeply about Darrow's empathy with black suffering, however, he said, "I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness when you have eyes to see and heart to feel what others are too blind and too callous to notice."

Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.

Faith is born out of suffering, and suffering is faith's most powerful contradiction. This is the Christian dilemma. The only meaningful Christian response is to resist unjust suffering and to accept the painful consequence of that resistance.

Hell is not just a place of torment; additionally it's a place of separation from God.

Hell ultimately is separation from God—not only separation from all that is good but also integration with all that is evil.

Paul's suffering was neither corrective nor instructive. It was simply permitted by God so that the gospel might spread to others.

Jesus had a universal concern for those who suffered that transcended the rules of the ancient world.

I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.

The only tyrannies from which men, women and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities.

A rose's beautiful scent is extracted only when it is crushed.