quotations about pain
Nature has placed in the front part of man, as he moves, all those parts which when struck cause him to feel pain; and this is felt in the joints of the legs, the forehead and the nose, and has been so devised for the preservation of man, because if such pain were not felt in these limbs they would be destroyed by the many blows they receive.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah
You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
1Q84
Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved.
NEIL GAIMAIN
Anansi Boys
Pain was exhausting in its inane imperviousness to everything. There was nothing, no persuasion or bribe you could bring to it. It was a monolithic idiot, the dumbest thing in the universe given complete control over the smartest, a heartbreaking inversion.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
See the wretch that long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again:
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening paradise.
THOMAS GRAY
"Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude"
Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.
LANCE ARMSTRONG
Every Second Counts
Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
To hurt is as human as to breathe.
J. K. ROWLING
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living
Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.
GLEN DUNCAN
A Day and a Night and a Day
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Collected Poems and Plays
Wherefore groan and lament over pain? Be, rather, thankful for this one sign of life; for the dead suffer no pain, and lay figures are never chilled by frost.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Pain obliterates everything else. In pain, there is only the eternal present.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus at Colonus