Family × Suffering

Family and Suffering

Browse 30 quotations catalogued under family with "suffering" in the text or topic label.

30 quotes

This collection contains 30 quotations filed under Family with "suffering" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Family and Suffering; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "If people would but understand that they are not the sons of some fatherland or other, nor of Governments, but are sons of God, and can therefore neither be sl…" The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and …" Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Family quotes or the concept page for Suffering.

30 Quotes on Family and Suffering

"If people would but understand that they are not the sons of some fatherland or other, nor of Governments, but are sons of God, and can therefore neither be slaves nor enemies one to another - those insane, unnecessary, worn-out, pernicious organizations called Governments, and all the sufferings, violations, humiliations and crimes which they occasion, would cease."

— Leo Tolstoy

"This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it. Considering that the people of this country are not having a very comfortable time, you can't perhaps, blame them for being somewhat callous about suffering elsewhere, but the remarkable thing is the extent to which they manage to be unaware of it. Tales of starvation, ruined cities, concentration camps, mass deportations, homeless refugees, persecuted Jews — all this is received with a sort of incurious surprise, as though such things had never been heard of but at the same time were not particularly interesting. The now-familiar photographs of skeleton-like children make very little impression. As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses."

— George Orwell

"As my own father was sick, and miserably tied to his invalid's chair, he would have been abandoned had not an old servant performed for him a so-called service of love. My mother gave parties while he was perishing in solitude, and amused herself while he was suffering bitter agonies"

— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets. the real work is done by the Jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loanmongering mysteries by concentrating their energies upon the barter trade in securities... Here and there and everywhere that a little capital courts investment, there is ever one of these little Jews ready to make a little suggestion or place a little bit of a loan. Thus do these loans, which are a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the houses of the children of Judah. This Jew organization of loan-mongers is as dangerous to the people as the aristocratic organization of landowners... The fortunes amassed by these loan-mongers are immense, but the wrongs and sufferings thus entailed on the people and the encouragement thus afforded to their oppressors still remain to be told. The fact that 1855 years ago Christ drove the Jewish moneychangers out of the temple, and that the moneychangers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again chiefly to be Jews, is perhaps no more than a historical coincidence. The loan-mongering Jews of Europe do only on a larger and more obnoxious scale what many others do on one smaller and less significant. But it is only because the Jews are so strong that it is timely and expedient to expose and stigmatize their organization."

"The terrible situation of the country makes my mind restless and I cannot keep silent. Meaningless ritual keep the Hindus divided in hundred sects. So we are suffering from series of defeats. We are tired and worn-out by the fortunes by the internal external enemies. The Muslims are united in religion and rituals. The Bengali Muslims the South Indian Muslims and even the Muslims outside India-all are united. They always stand united in face of danger. The broken and divided Hindus will not be able to combat them. Days are coming when the Hindus will be again humiliated by the Muslims. "You are a mother of children, one day you will die, passing the future of Hindus society on the weak shoulders of your children, but think about their future."

— Rabindranath Tagore

"These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry."

— Hermann Hesse

"The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings."

— Theodore Roosevelt

"Sympathy is the surest destruction of selfishness. Children, like the grown person, grow the better for participation in the sufferings where their own only share is pity."

— Letitia Elizabeth Landon

"As the anima does with men, the animus also creates states of possession in women. In myths and fairy tales this condition is often represented by the devil or an "old man of the mountain," that is, a troll or ogre, holding the heroine prisoner and forcing her to kill all men who approach her or to deliver them into the hands of the demon; or else the father shuts up the heroine in a tower or a grave or sets her on a glass mountain, so that no one can get near her. In such cases, the heroine can often do nothing but wait patiently for a savior to deliver her from her plight. Through her suffering, the animus can be gradually transformed into a positive inner force."

— Marie-Louise von Franz

"Assuming that each couple has three children, an original pair's cumulative descendants over ten generations amount to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless, avoidable suffering. To be sure, full responsibility for it all does not lie with the original couple because each new generation faces the choice of whether to continue that line of descendants. Nevertheless, they bear some responsibility for the generations that ensue. If one does not desist from having children, one can hardly expect one's descendants to do so."

— David Benatar

"Jimmy Carter has literally become such an anti-Israel bigot that there is a special place in Hell reserved for somebody like that. He has no sympathy or understanding for the suffering of the Jewish people—for the plight of the Jewish people. He loves every Muslim extremist he can find. He thought the former president of Syria—Assad—was a wonderful man. He bounced Yasser Arafat's children on his knee and loved Yasser Arafat and his crooked wife who stole three billion dollars from the Palestinian people, but he never had a kind word to say about almost any Israeli, except a few on the hard left who maybe tended to agree with him. ... If you're an Israeli, Carter doesn't like you and if you're an Arab or a Muslim, he likes you."

— Jimmy Carter

"We are about to sacrifice our civilization for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue to make enormous amounts of money. But it is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few. You say that you love your children above everything else. And yet you are stealing their future."

— Greta Thunberg

"Religious belief, trust, a sense of connection to the universe — no matter what you call it, there is a spiritual component to strong families. They see their lives as imbued with purpose, reflected in the things they do for one another and the community. Small problems provide a chance to grow; large ones are a lesson in courage. A mother whose son died of a brain tumor bravely returned to the hospital where he had died in order to set up a research fund. When she saw the parents of children who currently were suffering, she told her son’s doctor: "If any research you do produces any advance, my son’s passing won’t have been totally without purpose." It takes a certain type of spiritual grace to see beyond one’s own misery to the needs of others. Strong families try to live so they can look outward — and inward — every single day."

— Joyce Brothers

"I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure from his childhood. And I feel, after so many decades of studying this, that men are suffering from a sense of dependence on women, their sense that at any moment they could be returned to that slavery and servitude they experienced under a woman’s thumb, when they were a boy in the shadow of the mother. I got this from studying all world culture, and comparing and noticing how often there were these similar patterns in many different cultures. Many things that erupt in rape or violence, or battery and so on, are happening when a woman is pushing that button of fear and dependency."

— Camille Paglia

"In his 1918 diary, Hermann Hesse recalled a dream in which he heard two distinct voices. The first told him to seek out forces to overcome suffering, to calm himself. It sounded like parents, school, Kant, the church fathers. But the second voice—which sounded farther off, like "primal cause"—said that suffering only hurts because you fear it, complain about it, flee it."

— Marilyn Ferguson

"He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, “you are irrelevant”; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, “Listen.” For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky."

— Ursula K. Le Guin

"Those dry Deists and hard-headed Utilitarians who stalked the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were very obviously the products of the national religious spirit. The Scottish atheists were unmistakable children of the Kirk. And though they often seemed absurdly detached and dehumanised, the world is now rather suffering for want of such dull lucidity."

— G. K. Chesterton

"Mayblossom Senility" ...burnt out early or maybe just not much to burn in the first place. Not much energy in the faces, not much curiosity. Suffering in silence, nowhere to go after thirty in this life, just hang on and humor the children. Let the young enjoy themselves while they can. Why not?"

— Hunter S. Thompson

"Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum!"

— Tennessee Williams

"The only influences in 'The sick Child'.. ..were the ones that come from my home.. ..my childhood and my home. Only someone who knew the conditions at home could possibly understand why there can be no conceivable chance of any other place having played a part – my home is to my art as a midwife is to her children.. ..few painters have ever experienced the full grief of their subject as I did in 'The sick child'. It was not just I who was suffering; it was all my nearest and dearest as well."

— Edvard Munch

"When I think of those four terrible years and I think of the 7,000,000 of young men who were cut off in their prime, the 13,000,000 who were maimed and mutilated, the misery and the suffering of the mothers and the fathers, the sons and the daughters, and the relatives and the friends of those who were killed, and the wounded, then I am bound to say again what I have said before, and what I say now, not only to you but to all the world—in war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers. It is those thoughts which have made me feel that it was my prime duty to strain every nerve to avoid a repetition of the Great War in Europe."

— Neville Chamberlain

"The hon. Gentleman, and other hon. Gentlemen, are pleased to designate me as the arch enemy of the farmers. Sir, I have as good a right as any hon. Gentleman in this House to identify myself with the order of farmers. I am a farmer's son. The hon. Member for Sussex has been speaking to you as the farmer's friend; I am the son of a Sussex farmer; my ancestors were all yeomen of the class who have been suffering under this system; my family suffered under it, and I have, therefore, as good or a better right than any of you to stand up as the farmer's friend, and to represent his wrongs in this House."

— Richard Cobden

"We know nothing about the Christian transcendental God except His total indifference both to individual suffering and to the collapse of the pseudo Christian civilization which the Church supported. The pretension to a transcendental authority... was a hypnotic given to children and remaining with them as adults. During one period in history it served a purpose... its early rational opponents... were strangely naive, for they imagined that a half-developed faculty called "reason" should, and could, lead the species. But reason... is not a prime mover."

— Lancelot Law Whyte

"Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering."

— Robert F. Kennedy

"A large portion of Christ's miracles of love were wrought at the urgent request of parents for their suffering children. Is that ear gone deaf to-day? Will He not do for our children's souls what He did for the bodies of the ruler's daughter, and the dead youth at Nain?"

— Theodore L. Cuyler

"The children of the sun, the children of their sun — oh, how beautiful they were! Never had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might find, some remote faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood it all! It was the earth untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not sinned. They lived just in such a paradise as that in which, according to all the legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned; the only difference was that all this earth was the same paradise. These people, laughing joyfully, thronged round me and caressed me; they took me home with them, and each of them tried to reassure me. Oh, they asked me no questions, but they seemed, I fancied, to know everything without asking, and they wanted to make haste to smoothe away the signs of suffering from my face."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering."

— Emil Cioran

"The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind."

— Eric Hoffer

"Finally, attention must be drawn to one of the most important consequences of colonialism on African development, and that is the stunting effect on Africans as a physical species. Colonialism created conditions which led not just to periodic famine but to chronic undernourishment, malnutrition, and deterioration in the physique of the African people. If such a statement sounds wildly extravagant, it is only because bourgeois propaganda has conditioned even Africans to believe that malnutrition and starvation were the natural lot of Africans from time immemorial. A black child with a transparent rib cage, huge head, bloated stomach, protruding eyes, and twigs as arms and legs was the favorite poster of the large British charitable operation known as Oxfam. The poster represented a case of kwashiorkor—extreme malignant malnutrition. Oxfam called upon the people of Europe to save starving African and Asian children from kwashiorkor and such ills. Oxfam never bothered their consciences by telling them that capitalism and colonialism created the starvation, suffering, and misery of the child in the first place. There is an excellent study of the phenomenon of hunger on a world scale by a Brazilian scientist, Josue de Castro. It incorporates considerable data on the food and health conditions among Africans in their independent pre-colonial state or in societies untouched by capitalist pressures; and it then makes comparisons with colonial conditions. The study convincingly indicates that African diet was previously more varied, being based on a more diversified agriculture than was possible under colonialism. In terms of specific nutritional deficiencies, those Africans who suffered most under colonialism were those who were brought most fully into the colonial economy: namely, the urban workers."

— Walter Rodney

"From childhood to the age of six, I do not remember anything but shaving my head and suffering from it."

— Ahmad Kasravi

Key thinkers on this theme

Leo Tolstoy· Literature George Orwell· performing arts Arthur Schopenhauer· Philosophy Karl Marx· Philosophy Rabindranath Tagore· Music

Related ideas in Family

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