A Quote by Samuel Johnson

The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.

Samuel Johnson

Quote Topics

Detection Disturb Dread Harm Mind Operations Ourselves Pain Seldom Us Very Vigorous Which

Quote Author

Samuel Johnson
English - Writer
September 18, 1709 - December 13, 1784

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

Alan Watts

It is our own pain, and our own desire to be free of it, that alerts us to the suffering of the world. It is our personal discovery that pain can be acknowledged, even held lovingly, that enables us to look at the pain around us unflinchingly and feel compassion being born in us. We need to start with ourselves.

Sylvia Boorstein

Facing the darkness, admitting the pain, allowing the pain to be pain, is never easy. This is why courage - big-heartedness - is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey. But if we fail to let pain be pain - and our entire patriarchal culture refuses to let this happen - then pain will haunt us in nightmarish ways. We will become pain's victims instead of the healers we might become.

Matthew Fox

Some of us have a hard time believing that we are actually able to face our own pain. We have convinced ourselves that our pain is too deep, too frightening, something to avoid at all costs. Yet if we finally allow ourselves to feel the depth of that sadness and gently let it break our hearts, we may come to feel a great freedom, a genuine sense of release and peace, because we have finally stopped running away from ourselves and from the pain that lives within us.

Wayne Muller

Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain.

Jim Morrison

To diminish the suffering of pain, we need to make a crucial distinction between the pain of pain, and the pain we create by our thoughts about the pain. Fear, anger, guilt, loneliness and helplessness are all mental and emotional responses that can intensify pain.

Howard Cutler

But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.

Sue Miller

Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Pain prompts us to change behavior that is destructive to ourselves or to others. Pain can be a highly effective instructor.

Tony Dungy

I think we live in a time where we can all distract ourselves from facing the pain or the reality of all of our lives - tons of ways to hide, to kill pain, to deal with pain.

Benji Madden

The Gospel gives human suffering deep, personal, and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very "pain of God".

Richard Rohr

But pain is hard to put into words and in life there is always pain. It’s as natural as birth or death. Pain makes us who we are, it teaches us and tames us, it can destroy and it can save.

Anna McPartlin

The only thing we are naturally afraid of is pain, or loss of pleasure. And because these are not annexed to any shape, colour, or size of visible objects, we are frighted of none of them, till either we have felt pain from them, or have notions put into us that they will do us harm.

John Locke

Pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!

William Shatner

I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.