Quotes about Suffering

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.

People lead lives of quiet desperation.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

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

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.

To St. Paul, stripes, stones, shipwrecks, and thorns in the flesh were religious experiences to Judas Iscariot, the daily companionship of Jesus of Nazareth was not.

was exceptional in suffering, which was often by the choice of others, but exceptional in prayer, too, which was by his own choice. If more were strong in prayer, more would be suited to suffer. Prayer develops bone as well as groan, sinew as well as saintliness, fortitude as well as fire.

If you aren't smelling awful smells sometimes, then you're not where Jesus is.

If you've never bled, you have no material for preaching. If when you're finished preaching you're not finished, spent, wiped out — if you haven't "given blood" — you haven't really preached.9

It is this, it is this that oppresses my soul.