The okipa ceremony as witnessed by George Catlin, circa 1835.

Pain is an unpleasant sensation which may be associated with actual or potential tissue damage and which may have physical and emotional components.

Quotes

  • The sword of time will pierce our skin
    It doesn't hurt when it begins
    But as it works its way on in
    The pain grows stronger watch I bring
    That suicide is painless
    It brings so many changes
    And I can take or leave them if I please.
  • Pain is temporary, glory is forever.
    • Anonymous, quoted as an anonymous proverb in Preaching Proverbs : Wisdom for the Pulpit‎ (1996) by Alyce M. McKenzie, p. 84.
  • PAIN, n. An uncomfortable frame of mind that may have a physical basis in something that is being done to the body, or may be purely mental, caused by the good fortune of another.
  • But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
  • Beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything, what's a little bit of hunger? I can go a little while longer.
  • Douleur toujours nouvelle pour celui qui souffre et qui se banalise pour l'entourage.
    • Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him.
    • Alphonse Daudet, La doulou: (la douleur), 1887-1895 (Paris: Librairie de France, 1930) p. 16; Julian Barnes (ed. and trans.) In the Land of Pain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) p. 19.
  • In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.
  • It never occurred to me to call 911 or my physician. […] As foolish as it may appear, you are, in a sense, a prisoner of the pain, which was intolerable. You're thinking, what could I do to relieve myself of it. If it becomes intense enough, you're perfectly willing to accept cardiac arrest as a possible way of getting rid of the pain.
  • Pain is just Mother Nature’s little way of telling you not to do something again in a way you’ll remember.
    • Tim Huntley, One on Me (1980), Chapter 11
  • The term 'psychogenic' assumes that medical diagnosis is so perfect that all organic causes of pain can be detected; regrettably, we are far from such infallibility... All too often, the diagnosis of neurosis as the cause of pain hides our ignorance of many aspects of pain medicine.
    • Ronald Melzack, 1996, in Wall, PD; Melzack, R (1996). The Challenge of Pain. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-025670-9. 
  • There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.
  • A portion of life, every moment gets torn out of me hurting, and flees away.
  • My heart itself is a wound,
    no medicine can cure it.
    It deepens further if stared at,
    and hurts more if touched.
  • For I consider that the sufferings of the present time do not amount to anything in comparison with the glory that is going to be revealed in us. For the creation is waiting with eager expectation for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but through the one who subjected it, on the basis of hope that the creation itself will also be set free from enslavement to corruption and have the glorious freedom of the children of God. For we know that all creation keeps on groaning together and being in pain together until now.
  • Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?
    For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one.
  • That last moment belongs to us — that agony is our triumph.
  • It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion.
    • Colin Wilson in The Origins of the Sexual Impulse, p. 90 (1963)

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 575-76.
  • World's use is cold, world's love is vain,
    World's cruelty is bitter bane;
    But pain is not the fruit of pain.
  • Nature knows best, and she says, roar!
  • Pain is good, I'd say, when it's incidental to Love. In 'I give up my life for my friend' it is my friend, not my death, that matters. And sometimes I needn't give up my life for him, I can live for him, and with him, and the power of the spirit is then equally manifested, I should think.
    • E. M. Forster, Selected Letters: Letter 285, to George Thomson, 1 August 1931.
  • So great was the extremity of his pain and anguish, that he did not only sigh but roar.
  • There is purpose in pain,
    Otherwise it were devilish.
    • Owen Meredith (Lord Lytton), Lucile (1860), Part II, Canto V, Stanza 8.
  • You purchase pain with all that joy can give,
    And die of nothing but a rage to live.
  • The scourge of life, and death's extreme disgrace,
    The smoke of hell,—that monster callèd Paine.
  • Your pain comes upon the individual, one by one, to each man alone and no other, but my soul groans for the city, for me and you together.
  • There's a pang in all rejoicing,
    And a joy in the heart of pain;
    And the wind that saddens, the sea that gladdens,
    Are singing the selfsame strain.
  • Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
    That is not paid with moan;
    For we are born in others' pain,
    And perish in our own.
  • The mark of rank in nature is capacity for pain,
    And the anguish of the singer marks the sweetness of the strain.
    • Sarah Williams, Twilight Hours, Is it so, O Christ, in Heaven.
  • A man of pleasure is a man of pains.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night VIII, line 793.
  • When pain can't bless, heaven quits us in despair.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night IX, line 500.

See also

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