Suffering Awareness Quotes

It sometimes happened that you might be familiar with a man for several years thinking he was a wild animal, and you would regard him with contempt. And then suddenly a moment would arrive when some uncontrollable impulse would lay his soul bare, and you would behold in it such riches, such sensitivity and warmth, such a vivid awareness of its own suffering and the suffering of others, that the scales would fall from your eyes and at first you would hardly be able to believe what you had seen and heard. The reverse also happens.

At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.

I understand people's suffering, people's pain, more than you will every know yourself.

The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." - James Baldwin, "The Creative Process

Whoever lives in the spirit lives in perennial peace. It is a happy peace, a smiling peace, but one is not lost in it. One is aware also of the suffering which exists around him or her and the world at large.

Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

After all, what is suffering but an awareness of suffering?

There is no explanation you can give that will explain away all the sufferings and evil and torture and destruction and hunger in the world! You'll never explain it. Because life is a mystery, which means your thinking mind cannot make sense of it. For that you've got to wake up and then you'll suddenly realize that reality is not the problem, you are the problem.

The awful scenes of death and suffering we were witnessing on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.

We need to be aware of the suffering, but retain our clarity, calmness and strength so we can help transform the situation.

The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.

We shouldn’t come up with a pseudo-spiritual excuse for turning away from the pain of the world.

To God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience.

I think we all try to figure out ways to ignore the fact that life is about suffering. In the modern world, that's what we're surrounded with. We have all these little tools, such as phones and the Internet, to help us forget about suffering. Whenever you are tired, you don't have to really sit in the abyss of what it means to be alive. We always find ways to avoid it. When a ship sinks, you are sitting in it. There is no way to avoid.