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P Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All P Quotes

“Pain isn’t a lot of fun, at least not for most folks, but it is utterly unique to life. Pain — physical, emotional, and otherwise — is the shadow cast by everything you want out of life, the alternative to the result you were hoping for, and the inevitable creator of strength. From the pain of our failures we learn to be better, stronger, greater than what we were before. Pain is there to tell us when we’ve done something badly—it’s a teacher, a guide, one that is always there to both warn us of our limitations and challenge us to overcome them. For something no one likes, pain does us a whole hell of a lot of good.”

“Pain itself can be pleasurable accidentally in so far as it is accompanied by wonder, as in stage-plays; or in so far as it recalls a beloved object to one's memory, and makes one feel one's love for the thing, whose absence gives us pain. Consequently, since love is pleasant, both pain and whatever else results from love, in so far as they remind us of our love, are pleasant.”

“Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves.”

“Pain nourishes courage. You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you. Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional. Physical pain is a fact that comes with living, just as illness or financial woes or broken relationships are facts. But misery is a state of mind, a reaction to the facts, that can be controlled or altered by an act of will.”

“Pain, of course, is intimately linked with fear. “Fear isolates,” writes Rivera Garza. “Fear teaches us to distrust. Fear makes us crazy.” If we follow the arc of her argument, we see that pain has the power to destroy and to produce its own reality, a reality in turn legitimized and given further meaning through the politics and policies that shape our society. This reality is quite often a reality of fear, a reality that makes us—individually and as a society—crazy, isolated, filled with distrust for our fellow human beings, the people who share our neighborhoods, our cities, our country, our borders, our intractably and intimately interwoven global community—the people with whom we share our very lives.”