Suffering and Joy Quotes

Suffering, if it is accepted together, borne together, is joy.

Whether one is rich or poor, educated or illiterate, religious or nonbelieving, man or woman, black, white, or brown, we are all the same. Physically, emotionally, and mentally, we are all equal. We all share basic needs for food, shelter, safety, and love. We all aspire to happiness and we all shun suffering. Each of us has hopes, worries, fears, and dreams. Each of us wants the best for our family and loved ones. We all experience pain when we suffer loss and joy when we achieve what we seek. On this fundamental level, religion, ethnicity, culture, and language make no difference.

What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.

As the valley gives height to the mountain, so can sorrow give meaning to pleasure; as the well is the source of the fountain, deep adversity can be a treasure.

Perhaps there could be no joy on this planet without an equal weight of pain to balance it out on some unknown scale.

There is room in the halls of pleasure for a large and lordly train, but one by one we must all file on through the narrow aisles of pain.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

Isn't it funny that God takes you and puts you through the unendurable, and then, at the moment you have just begun to understand it and have some wisdom, it ends?

We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. (10)

Whether it is suffering or joy, going through experiences in life is not so much of a karma. Depriving yourself of any experience is the big karma.

But beneath it all will run that Sicilian understanding that the underside of joy is grief, that the face of sacrifice and suffering is the dark mirror image of pleasure and enjoyment, that every moment of arrival is to be treasured and enjoyed in the full knowledge that it has brought us a moment closer to the moment of departure.