Rudyard Kipling Quotes

You ever tried to pick up your teeth with a bunch of broken fingers

Only the toad under the harrow knows where it pinches him.

Suffering without understanding in this life is a heap worse than suffering when you have at least the grain of an idea what it's all for.

Pain is the root of knowledge.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

Only the tortured can understand those who have been tortured.

It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

The more you know, the sadder you get.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

I have learned what must be, and therefore have come to see the whole horror of what is.

THIS TORTURE Why should we tell you our love stories when you spill them together like blood in the dirt? Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor, or a fire we can’t see, but how does saying that push us through the top of the head into the light above the head? Love is not an iron pot, so this boiling energy won’t help. Soul, heart, self. Beyond and within those is one saying, How long before I’m free of this torture!

For a second I was just a kid – a kid who had lived all of his life in the same tiny town. Just a child. Because I knew I would have to live a lot more, suffer a lot more, to ever understand the searing agony in Edward’s eyes.

We suffer only until we realize that we can't know anything.

Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers.

Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.

I told myself – as I’ve told myself before – that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn’t slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.

Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.

You will be faced, now, with pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience. The Receiver himself was not able to describe it, only to remind us that you would be faced with it, that you would need immense courage.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.

I think the most important thing to remember is that pain passes. And artistically, the pain is going to pass. It's what you want to express out of the pain as opposed to indulging in the agony-and-pain mantra of songwriting that became such a hit in the '90s and still, all the way up to now.

My flesh was burning where the skin was scraped off my knees, and I was afraid that I couldn't be alive anymore with so much pain, and at the same time I knew I was alive because it hurt. I was afraid that death would find its way into me through this open knee and I quickly covered my knee with my hands.