Quotes to inspire and reflect

The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

Is it sin / To rush into the secret house of death / Ere death dare come to us?

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.

Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp; / Acids stain you; / And drugs cause cramp. / Guns aren’t lawful; / Nooses give; / Gas smells awful; /You might as well live.

No sane society chooses to commit national suicide.

Why dost thou complain of this world? It detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain.

He who saves a man against his will as good as murders him.

If life’s a joke, then suicide’s a bad punch line.

The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.

There is satiety in all things, in sleep, and love- making, / in the loveliness of singing and the innocent dance.

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, / And shares the nature of infinity.

Sufficiency’s enough for men of sense.

Suffering is one very long moment. We can not divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods and chronicle their return.

Hearts live by being wounded.

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of hungry reach.

If pain could have cpred us we should long ago have been saved.

Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.

To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

Man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

We are more sensible of one little touch of a surgeon’s lancet than of twenty wounds with a sword in the heat of fight.

To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.

Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt / A pain undiagnosable but felt.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

Much of your pain is self-chosen. / It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

A Wounded Deer—leaps highest.

Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.

Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by-the appalling total of human suffering; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arched before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine.

It is infinitely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to accept suffering as free, responsible men.

For sufferers it is sweet to know before-hand clearly the pain that still remains for them.

Who, except the gods, / can live time through forever without any pain?

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

Success is not greedy, as people think, but insignificant. That’s why it satisfies nobody.

Success abides longer among men / when it is planted by the hand of God.

When men succeed, even their neighbors think them wise.

Success / for the striver washes away the effort of striving.

Failure makes people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.

The way to rise is to obey and please.

Some men succeed by what they know; some by what they do; and a few by what they are. .

The Way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power—at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.