151 Quotes About Suffering

During an earthquake it sometimes happens that fresh springs break out in dry places which water and quicken the land so that plants can grow. In the same way the shattering experiences of suffering can cause the living water to well up in a human heart.

If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings.

Think of the ills from which you are exempt, and it will aid you to bear patiently those which now you may suffer.

You may suffer and yet be un-Christlike, but no man can be Christlike and fail to suffer. If you ever, by the grace of God, become a partaker of the divine nature you must also inevitably become a partaker of His sufferings.

In spite of sorrow, loss, and pain, our course be onward still; we sow on Burmah's barren plain, we reap on Zion's hill.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.

To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.

On my door is a cartoon of two turtles. One says, 'Sometimes I would like to ask why he allows poverty, famine and injustice when he could do something about it.' The other turtle says 'I am afraid that God might ask me the same question.'

That which is bitter to endure may be sweet to remember.

All commend patience, but none can endure to suffer.

Sufferings will be sweet and pleasant to us while we are with Him; and the greatest pleasures will be, without Him, a cruel punishment to us.

Let God enlarge you when you are going through distress. He can do it. You can't do it, and others can't do it for you.

If we do anything to further the kingdom of God, we may expect to find what Christ found on that road - abuse, indifference, injustice, misunderstanding, trouble of some kind. Take it. Why not? To that you were called. In Latin America someone who feels sorry for himself is said to look like a donkey in a downpour. If we think of the glorious fact that we are on the same path with Jesus, we might see a rainbow.

Great and small suffer the same mishaps.

I have something which enables me to take it in the face of all the buffeting that comes my way, for I can always find resources that are adequate to take the knocks.

The person who bears and suffers evils with meekness and silence, is the sum of a Christian man.

When God wants to do an impossible task He takes an impossible man and crushes him.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

Keep God's covenant in your trials; hold you by His blessed word, and sin not; flee anger, wrath, grudging, envying, fretting; forgive a hundred pence to your fellow-servant, because your Lord hath forgiven you ten thousand talents: for, I assure you by the Lord, your adversaries shall get no advantage against you, except you sin, and offend your Lord, in your sufferings.

When you suffer and lose, that does not mean you are being disobedient to God. In fact, it might mean you're right in the centre of His will. The path of obedience is often marked by times of suffering and loss.

Most of the verses written about praise in God's Word were voiced by people faced with crushing heartaches, injustice, treachery, slander, and scores of other difficult situations.

Suffering times are sealing times. The primitive Christians found them so, and the suffering saints in Mary's days found them so. When the furnace is seven times hotter than ordinary, the Spirit of the Lord comes and seals up a man's pardon in his bosom, his peace with God, and his title to heaven. Blessed Bradford looked upon his sufferings as an evidence to him that he was on the right way to heaven.

Difficulty excites the mind to the dignity which sustains and finally conquers misfortunes, and the ordeal refines while it chastens.

Heartache forces us to embrace God out of desperate, urgent need. God is never closer than when your heart is aching.

If you and I have taken the place of owning Christ as Lord, we shall be sure to have a little bit of suffering. If He is Lord over me, I must do everything to please Him, and I shall be sure to displease friends. I must give up this thing and not do the other, cost what it may, if He is Master.

My overcoat is worn out; my shirts also are worn out. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness.

Suffering is the strongest and closest fellowship in the world.

We must never forget that Christ did not suffer just during His three years of public ministry or the last few days of His life when He was crucified. No, He suffered throughout His life on earth. He who was without sin lived daily with the corruption and sinfulness of lost humanity.

This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself.

We all know people who have been made much meaner and more irritable and more intolerable to live with by suffering: it is not right to say that all suffering perfects. It only perfects one type of person - the one who accepts the call of God in Christ Jesus.

It is important to receive God's arrangement in the circumstances. This arrangement is the discipline of the Holy Spirit. To escape God's arrangement just one time is to lose an opportunity to have our capacity enlarged. A believer can never be the same after passing through suffering.

He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Why is this happening to me? Why am I having such a difficult time? One answer is that life is supposed to be difficult! It's what enables us to grow. Remember, earth is not heaven!

You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.

The greatest good suffering can do for me is to increase my capacity for God.

Sorrow comes soon enough without despondency. It does a man no good to carry around a lightning-rod to attract trouble.

The human heart is like the millstone in a mill; when you put wheat under it, it turns and grinds the wheat into flour. If you put no wheat in, it still grinds on, but then it is itself it grinds and slowly wears away.

If you bear the cross unwillingly, you make it a burden, and load yourself more heavily; but you must bear it.

God hasn't completely eliminated suffering from anyone's life. Jesus, who is both God and the perfect, sinless Man, nevertheless suffered as a man on this earth.

Duty does not consist in suffering everything, but in suffering everything for duty. Sometimes, indeed, it is our duty not to suffer.

That which thou dost not understand when thou readest, thou shalt understand in the day of thy visitation; for many secrets of religion are not perceived till they be felt, and are not felt but in the day of calamity.

Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills.

For one drop calls another down, till we are drowned in seas of grief.

The Lord frequently leads the saint through painful experiences in order that he may not love the Lord for his own sake.

Our prayers are heard, not because we are in earnest, not because we suffer, but because Jesus suffered.

The godly have some good in them, therefore the devil afflicts them; and some evil in them, therefore God afflicts them.

No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.

Suffer me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon man as men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly.

A doctor once told me of a child who could not breathe when it was born. In order to make it breathe doctor gave it a slight blow. ...he was really doing the kindest thing possible. As with newborn children the lungs are contracted, so are our spiritual lungs. But through suffering God strikes us in love. Then our lungs expand and we can breathe and pray.

God makes crosses of great variety; He makes some of iron and lead, that look as if they must crush; some of straw, that seem so light, and yet are no less difficult to carry; some He makes of precious stones and gold, that dazzle the eye and excite the envy of spectators, but in reality are as well able to crucify as those which are so much dreaded.

Humility alone unites patience with love; without which it is impossible to draw profit from suffering; or indeed, to avoid complaint, especially when we think we have given no occasion for what men make us suffer.

God hath many sharp-cutting instruments and rough files for the polishing of his jewels; and those he especially loves, and means to make the most resplendent, he hath oftenest his tools upon.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

Have you known fellowship in suffering with Christ? known deep waters? You will have to go down to them. If you do not get sorrow in fellowship with Christ, you will get it in discipline.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Never does a man know the force that is in him till some mighty affection or grief has humanized the soul.

As the weights of the clock, or the ballast in the vessel, are necessary for their right ordering, so is trouble in the soul-life.

Thou, Lord, bruisest me, but I am abundantly satisfied, since it is from Thy hand.

However dark and profitless, however painful and weary, existence may have become, life is not done, and our Christian character is not won, so long as God has anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do.

Misfortunes tell us what fortune is.

That cross inmate of your household, who has hitherto made life a burden to you, and who has been the Juggernaut car to crush your soul into the dust, may henceforth be a glorious chariot to carry you to the heights of heavenly patience and long-suffering.

Since God intends to make you like Jesus, he will take you through the same experiences Jesus went through. That includes loneliness, temptation, stress, criticism, rejection, and many other problems.

Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.

The servant of Christ must never be surprised if he has to drink of the same cup with His Lord.

A Christian is someone who shares the sufferings of God in the world.

The readiest way to escape from our sufferings is, to be willing they should endure as long as God pleases.

The chief secret of comfort lies in not suffering trifles to vex us, and in prudently cultivating an undergrowth of small pleasures, since very few great ones are let on long leases.

Nothing can work me damage, except myself. The harm that I sustain I carry about me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

Paul was Nero's prisoner, but Nero was much more God's.

The promises in your Word lift me up though sadness is all around me.

The problem is that contemporary people think life is all about finding happiness. We decide what conditions will make us happy and then we work to bring those conditions about. To live for happiness means that you are trying to get something out of life. But when suffering comes along, it takes the conditions for happiness away, and so suffering destroys all your reason to keep living. But to 'live for meaning' means not that you try to get something out of life but rather that life expects something from us. In other words, you have meaning only when there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness.129

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn.'

It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

An ounce of mirth is worth a pound of sorrow.

Gaining spiritual life is conditional on suffering loss. We cannot measure our lives in terms of "gain"; they must be measured in terms of "loss." Our real capacity lies not in how much we retain but in how much has been poured out. The power of love is attested by love's sacrifice. If our hearts are not separated from the love of the world, our soul life has yet to go through the cross.

That execrable sum of all villainies commonly called the slave-trade.

Calamity clarifies and comfort confuses; persecution purifies and prosperity pollutes!

Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.

Where do you run for help? When you are in trouble, what is your first instinct? Do you run to others or to God? Is it usually the counsel of another rather than the counsel found in waiting upon God in prayer? Why is this the way it is? Why do we run to man before we run to God?

The whole way from Syria to Rome, chained as I am to half a score of soldiers, who only grow more insolent the more bribes they are given. I look forward to the real lions that have been prepared for me. Oh I pray, as I will find them swift. I am going to make overtures to them, so that they may devour me with all speed."

God never wastes a hurt.

Tis better to suffer wrong than do it.

He who is willing to suffer for God and men does not live for himself; but those who daily seek sensuous pleasures and become apprehensive about bearing burdens for God and the church are living only for themselves.

The only man who ever suffered before Christ was that servant who had his ear cut off. But most likely in a moment afterward he had it on, and very likely it was a better ear than ever, because whatever the Lord does He does it well. No man ever lost his life with Him.

I have not suffered a lot for Christ, but I want to tell you that those times that I have suffered and I knew it was for Jesus, have been some of the happiest times of my entire life. I cannot tell you the indescribable joy that has come into my heart and my life.

The work of spirituality is to recognize where we are - the particular circumstances of our lives - to recognize grace and say, "Do you suppose God wants to be with me in a way that does not involve changing my spouse or getting rid of my spouse or my kids, but in changing me, and doing something in my life that maybe I could never experience without this pain and this suffering?

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.

Adversity is hard to endure, and can even be harder to understand. If God were really in control, why would He allow the tragic auto accident or crucial job loss? How could He permit cancer in a loved one or the death of a child? Grappling with His concern for us we ask, "Why is God allowing this?" or "What have I done wrong?

Every tear of sorrow sown by the righteous springs up a pearl.

You are tried alone; alone you pass into the desert; alone you are sifted by the world.

When a founder has cast a bell he does not presently fix it in the steeple, but tries it with his hammer, and beats it on every side to see if there be any flaw in it. So Christ doth not, presently after he has converted a man, convey him to heaven; but suffers him first to be beaten upon by many temptations, and then exalts him to his crown.

To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.

In spite of sorrow, loss, and pain, our course be onward still; we sow on Burmah's barren plain, we reap on Zion's hill.