quotations about pain
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah
Pain is the best cure for error.
JOHANN HEINRICH DANIEL ZSCHOKKE
"Harmonius", Tales from the German of Heinrich Zschokke
People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.
GENEEN ROTH
Good Housekeeping, December 2008
Nature has placed in the front part of man, as he moves, all those parts which when struck cause him to feel pain; and this is felt in the joints of the legs, the forehead and the nose, and has been so devised for the preservation of man, because if such pain were not felt in these limbs they would be destroyed by the many blows they receive.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
1Q84
Pain was exhausting in its inane imperviousness to everything. There was nothing, no persuasion or bribe you could bring to it. It was a monolithic idiot, the dumbest thing in the universe given complete control over the smartest, a heartbreaking inversion.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.
LANCE ARMSTRONG
Every Second Counts
Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
See the wretch that long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again:
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening paradise.
THOMAS GRAY
"Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude"
To hurt is as human as to breathe.
J. K. ROWLING
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Collected Poems and Plays
Wherefore groan and lament over pain? Be, rather, thankful for this one sign of life; for the dead suffer no pain, and lay figures are never chilled by frost.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.
GLEN DUNCAN
A Day and a Night and a Day
Pain obliterates everything else. In pain, there is only the eternal present.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow; but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon