Quotes about Suffering

Sometimes I think that hell is two places: it's a place you end up, but it's also a place that you live before you get there. I don't know if the devil's got horns and a spear for a tail, but I don't think that's the point. The point is that hell is separate from love. If Lucifer knows anything, he knows that. And ever since Emma left, I'd known the same thing. It's a lonely, desolate place.

I love them without trying to change them. I look at their suffering, their hopelessness, and while I'd like to wave a hand and fix it, I can't, so I do what I can... Climb down in their misery and love them where they are... People would much rather die holding someone's hand than live alone.

God is able to take your life, with all of the heartache, all of the pain, all of the regret, all of the missed opportunities, and use you for His glory.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

Criminal Minds, All You Can Eat: "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with.

As a culture, we seem to have an intolerance for suffering; we tend to want those who have experienced a loss of any kind to get on with their lives as quickly as possible. Often, by minimizing the impact of significant losses, pathologizing those whose reactions are intense, and applauding those who seem relatively unaffected by tragic events, we encourage the inhibition of our own grief.

Love and Pain go together, for a time at least. If you would know Love, you must know pain too.

Thus it seems that the Cross of Christ, laden with every sinful refusal of man, must stand at the very last extremity of hell; indeed, it must stand beyond hell, where the Son is forsaken by the Father in a way that only he can know.

In principle this implies something else, something harder to grasp, namely, that his whole suffering—a suffering that goes to the utter limits—follows from and actually expresses his eternal, triune joy.

This speciously deep thought was to haunt Christian metaphysics: that love without pain and guilt remains simply a joke, a game.