Pain and Despair

When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure .

In educating the young we use pleasure and pain as rudders to steer their course.

Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the house of pain.

Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.

It is easy for the one who stands outside The prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one Who suffers.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.

Our gratitude to most benefactors is the same as our feeling for dentists who have pulled our teeth. We acknowledge the good they have done and the evil from which they have delivered us, but we remember the pain they occasioned and do not love them very much.

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes in literature.

A long illness seems to be placed between life and death, in order to make death a comfort both to those who die and to those who remain.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.

A great Hope fell You heard no noise The Ruin was within.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

Happiness . . . is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert it only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested , and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

O, well it has been said, that there is no grief like the grief which does not speak!

I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing, eyes— I wonder if It weighs like Mine— Or has an Easier size.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.