Tao Te Ching
Suffering
The Buddha's first teachings focused on suffering and it's a theme or at least addressed in almost all religions, philosophical and political traditions. This universal experience often inspires people to begin a spiritual path, to seek their own discoveries of the deeper meanings of life, or to launch a life beyond inherited norms.
Quotes (101)
“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time”
“Discontent springs from a constant endeavor to increase the amount of our claims when we are powerless to increase the amount which will satisfy them.”
“Fools vainly think no sorrows like their own; but view the world and you will learn to bear misfortunes well, since all men have their share.”
“The cause of suffering is the desire to change things, to try to make them different, or hope they change.”
“Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful, sorrow, lamentation, dejection, and despair are painful. Contact with unpleasant things, not getting what one wishes is painful. In short, the five groups of grasping are painful.”
“Suffering follows a negative thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it.”
“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
“Anyone understanding their neighbor's suffering would be glad to go home with their own.”
“If we are content with whatever happens and follow the flow, joy and sorrow cannot affect us. This is what the ancients called freedom from bondage.”
“Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any human suffering. Just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not cure a disease of the body, to there is no profit in philosophy if it does not cure suffering of the mind.”
“The world is what we make it and all happiness and suffering is self-created. Why continuously make more and more unnecessary problems?”
“Watch a man in times of adversity to discover what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off.”
“If we really want to offer someone who is suffering a transfusion of peace and serenity, the best we can do is to be in touch with that in ourselves which is already beyond death.”
“We are not disturbed by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens to us.”
“We’re not disturbed by what happens to us – only by our thoughts about what happens to us”
“We hate suffering, but love it’s causes.”
“Had I not known sorrow and remorse, how could I have entered the path to liberation?”
“All pleasure and pain arise in the mind so cultivate mind’s nature; awaken consciousness in the heart’s core.”
“All of a man’s happiness is in his being the master of his ego, while all his suffering is in his ego being his master.”
“Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sufferings less, for it is said that all sorrows divided are made lighter.”
“When the bottom is filled with rubbish, just walk through the sludge.”
“If you would be free of this suffering, see the workings of your mind as but a single thought.”
“Happiness comes from wanting others to be happy, suffering from only wanting happiness for ourselves.”
“Like a dream, our actions seem to not be very meaningful or important; but, they bring about all the variety of happiness and suffering.”
“For both of us with right on love complain.
I am so full of sorrow, I maintain
Another single drop could find no place
To sit on me, because there is no space.”
“In suffering, the soul practices and acquires virtue, and becomes pure, wiser, and more cautious.”
“All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”
“Must it ever be thus-that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery?”
“My hair is grey, but not with years,
Nor grew it white
In a single night,
As men's have grown from sudden fears.”
“Accustom yourself to regarding the world as a place of suffering, a sort of penal colony and expect the calamities, torments, and miseries of life as normal... this makes us see other people in their true light and reminds us of what is most important: tolerance, patience charity”
“Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”
“Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be... We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”
“You could construe abandoning all hope of results as being to your welfare. For example fame, renown, comfort, and happiness in this life, later happiness among gods or men, even the desire to achieve the transcendence of misery itself.”
“You could construe abandoning all hope of results as being to your welfare. For example fame, renown, comfort, and happiness in this life, later happiness among gods or men, even the desire to achieve the transcendence of misery itself.”
“Adverse conditions are spiritual friends… Illness is the broom for evil and obscurations. Suffering is the dance of what is.”
“All suffering comes from desiring happiness for oneself.”
“Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not? How can we live and think that anyone has trouble—piercing trouble—and we could help them, and never try.”
“what is success without failure? what is a win without a loss? what is health without illness? you have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. there is always going to be suffering. it’s how you look at your suffering, how you deal with it, that will define you.”
“Life seems to many people like that African forest which a traveler described as a forest of fish-hooks, varied with an occasional patch of penknives.”
“About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good.”
“The word ‘ch’an, ‘dust,’ is a Buddhist term which means ‘the worry of worldliness’.”
“It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows... What do outside trappings matter?”
“Suffering raises up truly great souls; it is only small souls that it makes mean-spirited.”
“Did you think you could have the good without the evil? Did you think you could have the joy without the sorrow?... Sooner or later, regardless of the wit of man, we have pain to face; a reality; a final inescapable, immutable fact of life. What poor souls, if we have then no philosophy to face it with! I'll think about what I am going to write tomorrow-not about me, not about my body.”
“Seldom—or perhaps never—does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothy and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
“Even the knowing animals are aware that we feel little secure and at home in our interpreted world.”
“We wasters of sorrows… trying to foresee their end… they are nothing else than our winter foliage.”
“decorate the dungeon with flowers… As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners”
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding... watch with serenity through the winders of your grief.”
“The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of man to all that is hidden to others.”
“How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.”
“The mountains bow before this anguish,
The great river does not flow.
In mortal sadness the convicts languish;
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells
crowded with mortal woe...”
“Struggle is the most invaluable experience of all. Suffering seems to be the inevitable fate of the creative sensitive types. Poverty, disease, death, unrequited love affairs, and disappointments of every sort fan the flame of the artistic spirit. The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair then just plain hard work. Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation.”
“Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.”
“At its best life is short; half of its felicities are illusions and the other half are fatal in their consequences. There is little of which we can be certain, and much of which we must be regretful or ashamed.”
“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.”
“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
“What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.”
“It is always the intellectuals that suffer in any repressive society. But such situations toughen the moral fiber.”
“We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.”
“The extremity of the situation itself,[ the suffering] generates compassion because the most intense darkness is itself the seed of light, and all explicit warfare is implicit love.”
“Pain and death expose the pretense that one's inmost self is permanent, that it is in control. Hence the obscure but powerful feeling that one ought not to suffer or die.”
“You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and you turn it into compassion.”
“The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.”
“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”
“It is not impermanence tht makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.”
“Giving up dualistic mind is not like throwing away garbage, or as easy as just saying it... dualistic mind has existed for countless lives, beings obviously have not had any power to give it up. That is why grasping mind exists, which continuously causes suffering.”
“Drunk on freedom, trapped by desire, intoxicated with sex, and wandering in confusion; we stumble into the future.”
“If it's punishment, it's something outside. Someone is doing it to us. But if we think of it in terms of suffering, then it's with us and with others. That's a very different way of looking at it, being punished or just suffering.”
“If she's amazing, she won't be easy. If she's easy, she won't be amazing. If she's worth it, you wont give up. If you give up, you're not worthy... Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.”
“Forget your troubles and dance! Forget your sorrows and dance! Forget your sickness and dance! Forget your weakness and dance!”
“The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering.”
“When I should have felt real pain, I stifled it. I didn't want to take it on, so I avoided facing up to it. Which is why my heart is so empty now.”
“The only view that truly works for a dharma practitioner is that there are no solutions to the sufferings of samsara and it cannot be fixed… absolutely nothing genuinely works in samsara.”
“From time immemorial we have been addicted to the self that loathes suffering and loves the causes of suffering.”
“We expect to be comfortable all the time and when troubled wonder what went wrong. In fact we simply live in an unreliable world, there’s no escaping it.”
“Sometimes we are too polite with our suffering and allow it to dominate our life.”
“We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context, it helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions and reconcile ourselves to its presence.”
“Suffering is the promise that life always keeps... Grief is the bill of love fallen due.”
“As long as we don't recognize our real nature, we suffer. When we recognize our nature, we become free from suffering... Things you never dreamed possible begin to happen.”
“a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering... This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.”
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