top of page
"All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Suffering quotes

"One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."

"Although it pains me to admit it, I am quite familiar with the holes in life. And this familiarity is due to the fact that I spend far more time in these holes than I spend on the paths that brought me to them."

"The saints have to 'drink poison' (worldly suffering) and the world has to 'drink nectar' (worldly pleasures). Because people are weak."

"Discharge [disposal of karma] is in nature's hands. That's why there is restlessness. That is why these are the pains of dependency [association]. There are such times man has to face that it becomes difficult for him to pass even one hour."

"As long as there is worldly life, one is going to attain physical body, and as long as there is a body, there will be worldly miseries and troubles."

"If you allow it, [suffering] can be the means by which God brings you His greatest blessings."

"The suffering that is there in this world is such that it will fall off (go away), but people give support to it."

"Someone may have a broken heart or someone may have a broken ego. Such people will have to suffer tremendously because of that."
Explore more quotes by Richard Rohr

"Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens."

"Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don't have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You're trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps."

"God created us for love, for union, for forgiveness and compassion and, yet, that has not been our storyline. That has not been our history."

"Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside."

"The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo ' even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future."
bottom of page