Pain and Despair

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.

It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.

What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering...

It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

Alas, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the compassionate?And what in the world has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate?Woe to all lovers who cannot surmount pity!Thus spoke the Devil to me once: Even God has his Hell: it is his love for man.And I lately heard him say these words: God is dead; God has died of his pity for man.

To leave is to suffer,to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

You tell me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and assesses of burden!

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.

Having a grievance or resentment is like drinking poison and thinking it will kill your enemy.

The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned, pricks most deeply and draws more blood.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

To ease another’s heartache is to forget one’s own.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.