Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dean Karnazes

I never feel more alive than when I'm in great pain, struggling against insurmountable odds and untold adversity. Hardship? Suffering? Bring it!

Amber Benson

Mindi Scott has a real talent for getting inside her protagonist's head. She sketches out Coley's story in grand swathes, and then paints in all the little details, so that you feel as though you are enmeshed in Coley's brain: thinking her thoughts, feeling her confusion, anger, and, in the end, pain. I just don't think it's possible to read this book and not identify with Coley in some way.

Amartya Sen

If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy... It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.

Chuck Palahniuk

Fertility says, "Can you relax and just let things happen?" I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen? "And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything." But you can be ready for disaster. A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up. "If you worry about disaster all of the time, that's what you are going to get," Fertility says.

Chuck Palahniuk

Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That’s the earth. Why it goes around. We’re the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that’s just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.

Christopher Moore

We know there's going to be nothing but pain, but we go back again and again.

Angelina Jolie

What is it that turns people into artists? It often comes from some kind of pain or angst, a need to understand or express something. It very rarely comes from confidence, being raised by parents who want to hear what you have to say and wants to encourage you.

Angelina Jolie

Nature is about balance. All the world comes in pairs - Yin and Yang, right and wrong, men and women; whats pleasure without pain?

Andrew Cohen

Almost all the ideas we have about being a man or being a woman are so burdened with pain, anxiety, fear and self-doubt. For many of us, the confusion around this question is excruciating.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Grief is not in the nature of things, but in opinion.

Paulo Coelho

Everyone knows how to love,because we are all born with that gift.Some people have a natural talent for it but the majority of us have to re-learn,to remember how to love,and everyone,without exception,needs o burn on the bonfire of past emotions,to relieve certain joys and griefs,certain ups and downs,until they can see the connecting thread that exists behind each new encounter;because there is a connecting thread.

Marcus Aurelius

Ifit be a thing external that causes thy grief, know, that it is not that properly that doth cause it, but thine own conceit and opinion concerning the thing: which thou mayest rid thyself of, when thou wilt.

Kate Morton

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

Pema Chodron

Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Josh Billings

Dr. Holmes says, both wittily and truly, that crying widows are easiest consoled.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

Louis XIV

Heaven deprives me of a wife who never caused me any other grief than that of her death. [Fr., Le ciel me prive d'une epouse qui ne m'a jamais donne d'autre chagrin que celui de sa mort.]

Joan Didion

Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.