Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.
I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance.
I have only one passion, that for light, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and which has the right to happiness.
To tolerate is to take upon oneself; a tolerance that comes into being on the backs of others is no longer tolerance. To tolerate the suffering of others, to tolerate an injustice of which we are not a victim or an atrocity that we are spared is not tolerance but selfishness, indifference, or worse.
Who fears to suffer, already suffers what he fears.
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
There are only three events in a man's life birth, life, and death he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Art is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth.
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.
Perhaps men entertain as many truths as falsehoods; have as many good qualities as bad; feel as many pleasures as pains. But we like to malign human nature, in order to try to raise ourselves above the common level, and to acquire for ourselves the respect of which we strive to rob it. We are so presumptuous, that we imagine we can separate our own personal interests from those of humanity in general, and malign the human race without implicating ourselves. This absurd vanity has filled books of philosophy with diatribes against human nature. Man is in disgrace with all thinkers, who rival one another in accusing him of depravity. But perhaps he may be about to rise again and recover all his virtues; nothing is permanent, and philosophy, like clothes, music, architecture, &c, has its vogues.
To have suffered oneself makes one much more understanding of others' suffering.
There are only two remedies for the suffering of the soul: hope and patience.
I do not withdraw the wise man from the category of man, nor do I deny to him the sense of pain as though he were a rock that has no feelings at all.
Pain is short, and joy is eternal.
Great souls endure in silence.
We do not suffer from things to which we are accustomed.
Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.
Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain.
Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
Great is the power of habit. It teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.
Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.
It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.
Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.
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