The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Though a rational part of her mind said they needed her and would not seriously damage her, pain and terror pumped uncertainty through her heart.
When we are children, we believe that our elders know all and that even when we cannot understand the world, they can make sense of it. Even after we are grown, in moments of fear or sorrow, we still turn instinctively to the older generation, hoping to finally learn some great hidden lesson about death and pain. Only to learn instead that the only lesson is that life goes on.
Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
Say not "a small event!" Why "small"? Costs it more pain that this ye call A "great event" should come to pass From that? Untwine me from the mass Of deeds which make up life, one deed Power shall fall short in or exceed!
Relationship At times I feel an ache, an inner loneliness that cripples me. But I forget about God. I forget that God loves me, and actually wants a relationship with me. A Christian friend of mine told me that God has emotions. Not that he’s defensive and unstable, but he loves me and is sad when I turn away from him. He feels sadness when I’m hurt, and feels love and joy at my happiness. I matter to him. He isn’t an emotionless deity, watching from afar and not caring. He doesn’t go about his plans without caring if I’m involved. What I do matters to him. What I say matters. How I treat him. If I spend time with him. He loves me, and just as I would be hurt if someone I love rejected me, he’s hurt when I reject him. Just as I feel sad when someone I love is sad, or I’m in pain when they’re upset — God’s the same. He aches when I’m upset. He actually loves me. He cries when I cry. If only I could see it. Any pain I feel would be diminished in light of God’s love. He cares about every part of me. If only I could see it.
Hier ist keine Heimat--Jeder treibt / Sich an dem andern rasch und fremd voruber, / Und fragt nicht nach seinem Schmerz=--Here is no home for a man: every one drives past another hastily and unneighbourly, and inquires not after his pain.
Qui se ultro morti offerant, facilius reperiuntur, quam qui dolorem patienter ferant=--It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die than who will endure pain with patience.
You must accustom yourself more and more to the thought that here is not our abiding city, that all that we call ours here is only lent, not given us, and that if the sorrow for those we have lost remains the same, we must yet acknowledge with gratitude to God the great blessing of having enjoyed so many years with those whom He gave us, as parents, or children, or friends. One forgets so easily the happy years one has had with those who were the nearest to us. Even these years of happiness, however short they may have been, were only given us, we had not deserved them. I know well there is no comfort for this pain of parting: the wound always remains, but one learns to bear the pain, and learns to thank God for what He gave, for the beautiful memories of the past, and the yet more beautiful hope for the future. If a man has lent us anything for several years, and at last takes it back, he expects gratitude, not anger; and if God has more patience with our weakness than men have, yet murmurs and complaints for the life which He measured out for us as is best for us, are not what He expected from us. A spirit of resignation to God's will is our only comfort, the only relief under the trials God lays upon us, and with such a spirit the heaviest as well as the lightest trials of life are not only bearable, but useful, and gratitude to God and joy in life and death remain untroubled.
Empta dolore docet experientia=--Experience bought with pain teaches effectually.
This represents pleasure together with pain because one is never separated from the other; they are depicted back to back because they are opposed to each other; they are represented in one body because they have the same basis, because the source of pleasure is labour mingled with pain, and the pain issues from the various evil pleasures. And it is therefore represented with a reed in its right hand which is ineffectual and devoid of strength, and the wounds inflicted by it are poisonous. In Tuscany such reeds are placed to support beds, to signify that this is the place of idle dreams, that here a great part of life is consumed, here much useful time is wasted, that is, the morning hours when the mind is sober and rested and the body disposed to start on fresh labours; there, again, many vain pleasures are enjoyed by the mind, which pictures to itself impossible things, and by the body, which indulges in those pleasures that are so often the cause of the {52} failing of life; and for this reason the reed is used as their support.
~Language.~--The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language, but few are the hearts that can interpret it. Happy those to whom it is no foreign tongue, acquired imperfectly with care and pain, but rather a native language, learned unconsciously from the lips of the great mother.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Too much rest itself becomes a pain.
Gathering gear= (wealth) =is pleasant pain.
So, when a raging fever burns, We shift from side to side by turns; And 't is a poor relief we gain To change the place, but keep the pain.
We pain ourselves to please nobody.
A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, / We bid be quiet when we hear it cry; / But were we burdened with like weight of pain, / As much, or more, we should ourselves complain.
I know exactly what he’s feeling, because our pain is shared now. Whatever he goes through, I feel. Whatever I go through, he feels. It’s what happens when two people become one: they no longer only share love. They also share all of the pain, heartache, sorrow, and grief.
Die of a rose in aromatic pain.
Evil, what we call evil, must ever exist while man exists; evil, in the widest sense we can give it, is precisely the dark, disordered material out of which man's freewill has to create an edifice of order and good. Ever must pain urge us to labour; and only in free effort can any blessedness be imagined for us.
My rapier wit hides my inner pain.
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain That has been, and may be again.
The thing about pain is that it demands to be felt.
Oh would I were a boy again, When life seemed formed of sunny years, And all the heart then knew of pain Was wept away in transient tears!
Every moment instructs, and every object, for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure.
I am everything — Tonight I'll be your mother — I will Do such things to ease your pain — Free your mind and you won't feel ashamed.
That so much time was wasted in this pain. Ten thousand years ago he might have let off down To not return again! A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips; The laughter sets him free. A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries. The Fool is me! And with one final shake of laughter Breaks his bonds. The nails fall skittering to marble floors. And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle As Man steps down in amiable wisdom To give himself what no one else can give: His liberty.
~Pain.~--Psychical pain is more easily borne than physical, and if I had my choice between a bad conscience and a bad tooth, I should choose the former.--_Heinrich Heine._
The "Law of Nature" is not a command to do, or to refrain from doing, anything. It contains, in reality, nothing but a statement of that which a given being tends to do under the circumstances of its existence; and which, in the case of a living and sensitive being, it is necessitated to do if it is to escape certain kinds of disability, pain, and ultimate dissolution.
Except pain of body and remorse of conscience, all our evils are imaginary.
It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
Would that loving Father begin such a work in us as is now going on, and then destroy it, leave it unfinished? No, what is will be; what really is in us will always be; we shall be because we are. Many things which are now will change, but what we really are we shall always be; and if love forms really part of our very life, that love, changed it may be, purified, sanctified, will be with us, and remain with us through that greatest change which we call death. The pangs of death will be the same for all that, just as the pangs of childbirth seem ordained by God in order to moderate the exceeding joy that a child is born into the world. And as the pain is forgotten when the child is born, so it will be after death--the joy will be commensurate to the sorrow. The sorrow is but the effort necessary to raise ourselves to that new and higher state of being, and without that supreme effort or agony, the new life that waits for us is beyond our horizon, beyond our conception. It is childish to try to anticipate, we cannot know anything about it; we are meant to be ignorant; even the _Divina Commedia_ of a great poet and thinker is but child's play, and nothing else.... No illusions, no anticipations; only that certainty, that quiet rest in God, that submissive expectation of the soul, which knows that all is good, all comes from God, all tends to God.
What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.
A feeling of sadness and longing That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain.
All our evils are imaginary, except pain of body and remorse of conscience.
To frown at pleasure, and to smile in pain.
We know our time on this Earth is fleeting. We know that we will each have our share of pleasure and pain, that even after we chase after some earthly goal, whether its wealth or power or fame or just simple comfort, we will, in some fashion, fall short of what we had hoped. We know that, no matter how good our intentions, well all stumble sometimes in some way. Well make mistakes, well experience hardships and even when were trying to do the right thing, we know that much of our time will be spent groping through the darkness, so often unable to discern Gods heavenly plans. Theres only one thing we can be sure of, and that is the love that we have for our children, for our families, for each other. The warmth of a small childs embrace, that is true.
To remember happiness which cannot be restored is pain, but of a softened kind. Our recollections are unfortunately mingled with much that we deplore, and with many actions that we bitterly repent; still, in the most checkered life, I firmly think there are so many little rays of sunshine to look back upon that I do not believe any mortal would deliberately drain a goblet of the waters of Lethe if he had it in his power.--_Dickens._
Im Schmerze wird die neue Zeit geboren=--In pain is the new time born.
People think that grief is pain, but it is not so: Grief, the absorption in the quiet recollection of what was, but is no longer, is a pleasure, a consolation, a blessing.
The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.
The pain which conscience gives the man who has already done wrong is soon got over. Conscience is a coward; and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent, it seldom has justice enough to accuse.
Sorrow is necessary and good for men; one learns to understand that each joy must be indemnified by suffering, that each new tie which knits our hearts to this life must be loosed again, and the tighter and the closer it was knit, the keener the pain of loosening it. Should we then attach our hearts to nothing, and pass quietly and unsympathetically through this world, as if we had nothing to do with it? We neither could nor ought to act so. Nature itself knits the first tie between parents and children, and new ties through our whole life. We are not here for reward, for the enjoyment of undisturbed peace or from mere accident, but for trial, for improvement, perhaps for punishment; for the only union which can secure the happiness of men, the union between our Self and God's Self, is broken, or at least obscured, by our birth, and the highest object of our life is to find this bond again, to remain ever conscious of it and hold fast to it in life and in death. This rediscovery of the eternal union between God and man constitutes true religion among all people.
Magna est vis consuetudinis: h?c ferre laborem, contemnere vulnus et dolorem docet=--Great is the power of habit: teaching us as it does to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.
Remembrance wakes with all her busy train, / Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.
Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain.
The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it. We lose the right of complaining sometimes by forbearing it, but we often treble the force.
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
How long I have lived, how much lived in vain! / How little of life's scanty span may remain! / What aspects old Time in his progress has worn! / What ties cruel fate in my bosom has torn! / How foolish, or worse, till our summit is gain'd! / And downward, how weaken'd, how darken'd, how pain'd!
~Christ.~--Our religion sets before us, not the example of a stupid stoic who had by obstinate principles hardened himself against all sense of pain beyond the common measures of humanity, but an example of a man like ourselves, that had a tender sense of the least suffering, and yet patiently endured the greatest.--_Tillotson._
[H]ere is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today’s industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ] However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
Ever must pain urge us to labour, and only in free effort can any blessedness be imagined for us.
Man yields to custom as he bows to fate, / In all things ruled--mind, body, and estate; / In pain, in sickness, we for cure apply / To them we know not, and we know not why.
He never knew pain who never felt the pangs of love.
I have a high pain threshold. In fact, it's more of a large and tastfully decorated foyer than a threshold. But I do get easily bored
Spangling the wave with lights as vain As pleasures in the vale of pain, That dazzle as they fade.
But for the unquiet heart and brain A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise Like dull narcotics numbing pain.
It is only when the mind, which has taken shelter behind the walls of self-protection, frees itself from its own creations that there can be that exquisite reality. After all, these walls of self-protection are the creations of the mind which, conscious of its insufficiency, builds these walls of protection, and behind them takes shelter. One has built up these barriers unconsciously or consciously, and one’s mind is so crippled, bound, held, that action brings greater conflict, further disturbances. So the mere search for the solution of your problems is not going to free the mind from creating further problems. As long as this center of self-protectiveness, born of insufficiency, exists, there must be disturbances, tremendous sorrow, and pain; and you cannot free the mind of sorrow by disciplining it not to be insufficient. That is, you cannot discipline yourself, or be influenced by conditions and environment, in order not to be shallow. You say to yourself, “I am shallow; I recognize the fact, and how am I going to get rid of it?” I say, do not seek to get rid of it, which is merely a process of substitution, but become conscious, become aware of what is causing this insufficiency. You cannot compel it; you cannot force it; it cannot be influenced by an ideal, by a fear, by the pursuit of enjoyment and powers. You can find out the cause of insufficiency only through awareness. That is, by looking into environment and piercing into its significance there will be revealed the cunning subtleties of self-protection. After all, self-protection is the result of insufficiency, and as the mind has been trained, caught up in its bondage for centuries, you cannot discipline it, you cannot overcome it. If you do, you lose the significance of the deceits and subtleties of thought and emotion behind which mind has taken shelter; and to discover these subtleties you must become conscious, aware. Now to be aware is not to alter. Our mind is accustomed to alteration which is merely modification, adjustment, becoming disciplined to a condition; whereas if you are aware, you will discover the full significance of the environment. Therefore there is no modification, but entire freedom from that environment. Only when all these walls of protection are destroyed in the flame of awareness, in which there is no modification or alteration or adjustment, but complete understanding of the significance of environment with all its delicacies and subtleties—only through that understanding is there the eternal; because in that there is no “you” functioning as a self-protective focus. But as long as that self-protecting focus which you call the “I” exists, there must be confusion, there must be disturbance, disharmony, and conflict. You cannot destroy these hindrances by disciplining yourself or by following a system or by imitating a pattern; you can understand them with all their complications only through the full awareness of mind and heart. Then there is an ecstasy, there is that living movement of truth, which is not an end, not a culmination, but an ever-creative living, an ecstasy which cannot be described, because all description must destroy it. So long as you are not vulnerable to truth, there is no ecstasy, there is no immortality.
For let our finger ache, and it endues / Our other healthful members ev'n to that sense / Of pain.
Lightly from fair to fair he flew, And loved to plead, lament, and sue; Suit lightly won, and short-lived pain, For monarchs seldom sigh in vain.
O l'amour d'une mere! amour que nul n'oublie! / Pain merveilleux, que Dieu partage et multiplie! / Table toujours servie au paternel foyer! / Chacun en a sa part, et tous l'ont tout entier=--Oh, the love of a mother, love no one forgets; miraculous bread which God distributes and multiplies; board always spread by the paternal hearth, whereat each has his portion, and all have it entire!
Dear God, My heart is heavy from my past mistakes. There’s been times in my life I’ve caused others pain. I ask that today you set me free, and lift this weight off my heart. I know you forgive me Father, but I need to learn how to forgive myself. Let the burden of my self-doubt and guilt be lifted. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.
L'homme est un apprenti, la douleur est son maitre; / Et nul ne se connait, tant qu'il n'a pas souffert=--Man is an apprentice, pain is his master; and none knows himself so long as he has not suffered.
One fire burns out another's burning, One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.
Then with no throbs of fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.
We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.
Sweet is true love though given in vain, / And sweet is death that puts an end to pain.
Oh, the glory of the message! For fifteen centuries Israel had a sanctuary with a Holiest of All, into which, under pain of death, no one might enter. Its one witness was: Man cannot dwell in God's presence; cannot abide in His fellowship. And now how changed is all! As then the warning sounded: "No admittance! enter not!" so now the call goes forth: "Enter in! the veil is rent; the Holiest is open; God waits to welcome you to His bosom; henceforth you are to live with Him." This is the message. Child! thy Father longs for thee to enter, to dwell, and to go out no more forever.--_Andrew Murray._
Hard I strove To put away my immortality, Till my collected spirits swell'd my heart Almost to bursting; but the strife is past. It is a fearful thing to be a god, And, like a god, endure a mortal's pain; To be a show for earth and wondering heaven To gaze and shudder at! But I will live, That Jove may know there is a deathless soul Who ne'er will be his subject. Yes, 'tis past. The stedfast Fates confess my absolute will, — Their own co-equal.
It’s a strange thing, to never know peace. To know that no matter where you go, there is no sanctuary. That the threat of pain is always a whisper away.
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price … One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
The heart of God through his creation stirs, We thrill to feel it, trembling as the flowers That die to live again, — his messengers, To keep faith firm in these sad souls of ours. The waves of Time may devastate our lives, The frosts of age may check our failing breath, They shall not touch the spirit that survives Triumphant over doubt and pain and death.
Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor=--Pain makes even the innocent forswear themselves.
Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again, / The eternal years of God are hers; / But error, wounded, writhes with pain, / And dies among his worshippers.
When the head aches, all the members partake of the pain.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
A mighty pain to love it is, And 't is a pain that pain to miss; But of all pains, the greatest pain It is to love, but love in vain.
Mental illness turns people inwards. That’s what I reckon. It keeps us forever trapped by the pain of our own minds
Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, The mist in my face. No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers, The heroes of old; Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears Of pain, darkness, and cold.