“The more I’ve suffered in my life and also read the accounts of the sufferings of others, the more I’ve noticed a pattern. Those who seem to be supremely virtuous and heroic tend to take their sufferings in stride, as if they had no other choice. When they suffer, they suffer fully — they feel the feelings, cry, fight and do whatever they have to do not to hide their suffering or pretend it isn’t there, but to move beyond it. We’re supposed to suffer. It is the condition of consciousness, our blessing and curse. Modern living has made us think that suffering a burden to be surpassed, but surpassing suffering merely means dulling our consciousness. Suffering will never go away, not without severe consequence. We either learn to take it in stride or we miss out on an important facet of living.”

Explore more quotes:


About the author

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.