There is no such thing as "natural law": this expression is nothing but old nonsense. . . Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold; in short, need.
I call it suffering and pain, they call it entertainment.
Savoir souffrir sans se plaindre, ça c'est la seule chose pratique, c'est la grande science, la leçon à apprendre, la solution du problème de la vie. [Knowing how to suffer without complaining is the only practical thing, it's the great science, the lesson to learn, the solution to the problem of life. ]
Unfortunately, after Sept. 11, there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous.
For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
Ask for a valiant heart which has banished the fear of death, which looks upon the length of days as one of the least of nature's gifts; which is able to suffer every kind of hardship, is proof against anger, craves for nothing, and reckons the trials and gruelling labours of Hercules as more desirable blessings than the amorous ease and the banquets and cushions of Sardanapallus. The things that I recommend you can grant to yourself.
Some suffer from real misfortunes. Sadly, others only imagine that they do.
For there are deeds which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.
If anything goes wrong, the customer doesn't care whose fault it is. He's the one who's going to suffer anyway.
And Christ, through His own salvific suffering, is very much present in every human suffering, and can act from within that suffering by the powers of His Spirit of truth, His consoling spirit.
The question is not can animals speak but can they suffer.
Pain and love - the whole of life, in short - cannot be looked on as a disease just because they make us suffer.
We're not the paragons of virtue that we'd all like to think we are. And so, to shatter that myth, God will use suffering to expose the stuff of which we're made.
Suffering is not an elective; it is a core course in the University of Life.
Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a polluted mind, suffering will follow you, as the wheels of the oxcart follow the footsteps of the ox. Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you, as a shadow clings to a form.
It is the greatest and the tallest of trees that the gods bring low with bolts and thunder. For the gods love to thwart whatever is greater than the rest. They do not suffer pride in anyone but themselves.
I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, "God" always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.
The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.
Unhappiness, I saw then, comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction the we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity. Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one's own skin, in one's own brain.
Poor fellow, he suffers from files.
