All Quotes By Tag: Suffering

“He who cannot endure the bad will not live to see the good.”

“You would suffer for many things in life and misplaced priority is one of them.”

“There is simply no problem of life; it is absolutely purposeless play; it doesn’t have to continue; there is no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, gestures gesturing. If there is any problem at all it is to find out how people come to think there is a problem, whatever made them imagine that life is serious. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, multiplicity are all complications of it. Pain and suffering are very far-out forms of play, and there just isn’t anything at all to be afraid of. There isn’t any ego. The ego is a kind of flip, knowing that you know — like being afraid of being afraid. It’s a curlicue, an extra jazz to things, a sort of double take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety.”

“I wish I could be with you all,’ I responded, getting all worked up myself over someone I had almost entirely stopped thinking about. Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”

“Success and suffering are two sides of the same coin.”

“Do not despair. We will glimpse another track; we fill find another route. The day that is not this will come. The time that is not this will be.”

“To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, are measures of apparent despair and of secret consolation. Our destiny (in contrast to Swedenborg’s hell and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironbound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

“It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.”

“Nismo li možda tijekom vremena tumačili kršćanstvo suviše isključivo kao religiju osjetljivu za grijeh te u skladu s tim premalo osjetljivu za trpljenje?”

“One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it’s one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for ‘exile,’ or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the ‘proof,’ so for a time the professional interpreters of god’s will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein’s ‘offer’ of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.”

“If everyone only gave a fraction of the compassion their hearts are capable of giving… how much suffering could we alleviate in this world?”

“Sometimes it’s the suffering we don’t ask for that means the most.”

“Comfort rarely produces great art.”

“The thick baffling blades of false world customs rip off my views and ideas,like breaking every string of my aesthetic thoughts in disdain and jealousy;pain pain enough your tigrine roars before I die.”

“Ah! listen the song of storm from my disturbed soul;and it scatters flower buds into its lonely halls;like every pain needs a dirge,with wreaths that awful the world framed one for me,and gives the time it calls.”