suffering5 quotes

“Human life is miserable in this exact way: you fall short of your ideals but you exceed your low expectations. You are too good to enjoy what’s base but not good enough to fulfill your higher calling. A little more than nothing and a little less than something. No peace in the void, no plenitude of being.”

“Every truly moral development requires such a passing through experiences, regrets, and sorrows. Only after a long voyage can the conscience recognize evil as such.”

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”

“When we contemplate this display of passions and the consequences of their violence, the unreason which is associated not only with them, but even—rather we might say especially— with good designs and righteous aims; when we see arising therefrom the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can hardly avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption...But in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?”

“Listen closely. Of all that breathes and crawls across the earth, our mother earth breeds nothing feebler than a man. So long as the gods grant him power, spring in his knees, he thinks he will never suffer affliction down the years. But then, when the happy gods bring on the long hard times, bear them he must, against his will, and steel his heart. Our lives, our mood and mind as we pass across the earth, turn as the days turn…as the father of men and gods makes each day dawn.”