C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Suffering

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Henry Ward Beecher.

Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

Shakespeare.

Some of His children must go into the furnace to testify that the Son of God is there with them.

E. Prentiss.

Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And Life is perfected by Death.

E. B. Browning.

A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.

Lowell.

For there are deeds
Which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.

Shelley.

We have suffered lightly, if we have suffered what we should weep for.

Seneca.

What is deservedly suffered must be borne with calmness, but when the pain is unmerited, the grief is resistless.

Ovid.

Suffering is my gain; I bow
To my heavenly Father’s will,
And receive it hushed and still:
Suffering is my worship now.

Jean Paul Richter.

Those who inflict must suffer, for they see
The work of their own hearts, and that must be
Our chastisement or recompense.

Shelley.

And taste
The melancholy joys of evils pass’d,
For he who much has suffer’d, much will know.

Homer.

The cross of Christ is the pledge to us that the deepest suffering may be the condition of the highest blessing; the sign, not of God’s displeasure, but of His widest and most compassionate face.

Dean Stanley.

They, the holy ones and weakly,
Who the cross of suffering bore,
Folded their pale hands so meekly,
Spake with us on earth no more!

Longfellow.

Our merciful Father has no pleasure in the sufferings of His children; He chastens them in love; He never inflicts a stroke He could safely spare; He inflicts it to purify as well as to punish, to caution as well as to cure, to improve as well as to chastise.

Hannah More.

Not till I was shut up to prayer and to the study of God’s word by the loss of earthly joys—sickness destroying the flavor of them all—did I begin to penetrate the mystery that is learned under the cross. And wondrous as it is, how simple is that mystery! To love Christ, and to know that I love Him—this is all.

E. Prentiss.

To each his suff’rings; all are men,
Condemn’d alike to groan;
The tender for another’s pain,
Th’ unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate.
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their paradise.

Gray.

Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD