A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
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I knew that suffering did not enoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; seperation from what is pleasing is suffering... in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
You know that your happiness and suffering depend on the happiness and suffering of others. That insight helps you not to do wrong things that will bring suffering to yourself and to other people.
The world is full of suffering. Birth is suffering, decre- pitude is suffering, sickness and death are sufferings. To face a man of hatred is suffering, to be separated from a beloved one is suffering, to be vainly struggling to satisfy one's needs is suffering. In fact, life that is not free from desire and passion is always involved with suffering.
There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.
Sometimes suffering is just suffering,” she told Gus. “It doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't build character. It only hurts.
Happiness and suffering support each other. To be is to inter-be. It's like the left and the right. If the left is not there, the right cannot be there. The same is true with suffering and happiness, good and evil.
Suffering increases your inner strength. Also, the wishing for suffering makes the suffering disappear.
Why do men learn through pain and suffering, and not through pleasure and happiness? Very simply, because pleasure and happiness accustom one to satisfaction with the things given in this world, whereas pain and suffering drive one to seek a more profound happiness beyond the limitations of this world.
It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
Those desiring to escape from suffering hasten right toward suffering. With the very desire for happiness, out of delusion they destroy their own happiness as if it were an enemy
What is the noble truth of suffering? Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering and sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering.
Nobody wants to see the truth. Everybody wants to have the fantasy. When I look back at the books I was reading in my childhood were selling some sort of fantasy as well. Most stories are not going to tell the deep suffering of every day. No book prepared me for the suffering I would experience in life because the word "suffering" does not even describe what the suffering is. No story is going to tell you that, and no words can tell you that.
Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. ... To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism.
The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can't stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope--and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend up on it) disappoint us.
Buddhism teaches us not to try to run away from suffering. You have to confront suffering. You have to look deeply into the nature of suffering in order to recognize its cause, the making of the suffering.
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