I want to suffer so that I may love.

If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains.

You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.

The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead. If, then, we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures. Without such willingness there can be no growth in the intensity of consciousness.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.

We must learn to suffer more.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

One truly must have suffered oneself to help others.

Let us suffer absurdities, for that is only to suffer one another.

If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.

It's a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering.

Love demands sacrifice. But if we love until it hurts, God will give us His peace and joy…. Suffering in itself is nothing; but suffering shared with Christ’s Passion is a wonderful gift.