Top 380 Painful Quotes

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

I was destined to work with dying patients. I had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I felt called to travel some 250,000 miles each year to hold workshops that helped people cope with the most painful aspects of life, death and the transition between the two.

School was unbelievably painful. It was five years of being pretty sad.

However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

The last time I was pulled over was in 2005. I was going 55 in a 35 mile per hour zone – which I don’t understand because you can barely even idle at 35 miles per hour. Anyway, I was ordered to go to traffic school. It was an 8-hour class and really painful.

Just because I’m talking about something that might have been a sad or painful situation doesn’t mean that I’m sad or tortured 24 hours a day any more than anybody else is.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

When they call the slightest spending reductions ‘painful’, we will say ‘If government spending prevents pain, why are we suffering so much of it?’ And ‘If you want to experience real pain, just stay on the track we are on.’

I went to hospital and they gave me an MRI scan and thought it was a non-cancerous tumour, because I had bled in my pituitary gland. It was very painful, so they ended up delivering John early. That whole process was terrifying. All I cared about was John.

People lie to themselves all the time about what they’ve been through and what it means – I’m no exception. But you write those lies down – lies that really matter to you and that are really painful to let go of because they’ve become a part of who you are – and they don’t work.

Being a singer, I can easily break facial extremities, but breaking my nose in Luxembourg was extremely painful.

I know that when you are experiencing failure, it’s pretty damn painful. It is easy in retrospect to wax poetic about it. But in the moment, you don’t think you will survive, let alone have the time to reflect on how valuable those lessons will be for you in the future.

However painful or regrettable Brexit may be, it will not stop the E.U. as it moves to the future; we need to move forward.

Entrepreneurs, guys that start businesses, grow with them. It’s more painful than it would appear.

There is nothing more painful than watching a child with a terminal disease.

Conformity is painful. You know, it’s too tight. Conformity leads to rebellion. So a desire for happiness is in direct conflict with a desire for freedom.

There was a special challenge in describing the awful childhood of a person who happens to be my own husband. It was very painful at times, for both of us.

I’m one of those low-maintenance people – let’s get it done and get going. It’s not that painful to wax, but… I don’t have time for it – just give me the razor.

It astonished me in the early Nineties to suddenly have musicians admit that they had been inspired and influenced by us. That meant a lot at that time. But of course, being human, the… disrespect isn’t even strong enough a word, is it? The opprobrium was painful. Being popular and hated is not satisfying.

The embarrassment of a situation can, once you are over it, be the funniest time in your life. And I suppose a lot of my comedy comes from painful moments or experiences in life, and you just flip them on their head.

It was very painful to be so close to a World Cup final.

Pain is important, and changing who you are is difficult, painful, and scary. Most of the self-help industry sees change as this euphoric, liberating thing and tells you that you can be happy all the time. I think the opposite.

I’ve been in a lot of fiery relationships, and it is so exciting. But there’s a more profound feeling when the love is just real and not so painful.

Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don’t get the rocket back for inspection.

If I’m looking at life without a spiritual perspective, it’s a lot more painful, a lot more confusing, and there’s so much that I don’t understand.

In a recession, people want to be told for two hours that everything is going to be OK. They want to escape from their humdrum or painful reality into a feel-good drama, or a love story that transcends their daily life.

Romantic love is painful.

It’s really painful when four singers are asked to sing one track, and in the end, only one of them is kept. What about the other three artists?

I was really inspired by the film Minority Report when he sees the projection of his wife because she’s no longer there, but she’s life-size and in the room with him, and that’s very painful.

A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I’ve seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I’ve never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That’s amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that’s being taken apart.

People say it’s cathartic to write a book, but it turned out to be quite painful!

And in this respect, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy, a clash between one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim.

How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception.

Work is a salvation. Work is how you connect with who you are, no matter how painful it might be.

My life has actually been full of challenges and painful moments – but I tried to bury such circumstances and work with complete dedication.

Because we make ourselves deaf to feedback, because we overestimate our abilities, because we become consumed with ourselves, we end up subjecting ourselves not just to the inevitable stumbles or difficulties of life but catastrophic, painful failures.

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.

Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful.

It is always painful when you see a teammate leaving. You create a bond, and you have been together for so long, and you are going to do your best with your guys.

Liberty never had to file bankruptcy, thanks to God’s blessings, but we did go through tough times and painful debt restructuring in the 1990s.

My story wasn’t one of those cliched stories of being an ugly duckling, I had a pretty good time at school. But then I think being six foot by the age of 15 meant that I couldn’t help but be noticed, and that was when my physical being felt quite painful – I could not any longer walk into a room without being noticed.

I like the idea of a place that is dealing with painful, messy, frightening, and very human events that is also so beautiful and ethereal.

As they say in the bible, that you’re supposed to rejoice when people die and mourn when they’re born, because it’s one of the most painful acts you go through in life, is being born, and dying.

I was never jailed. The fact is that I was arrested, but I went into a diversion programme, and by that time I’d already begun working in what was called anger management. It was a painful and awful moment.

What I love about natural climate solutions is that we should be doing all these things anyway. Instead of making painful choices and deploying miserable means to a desirable end, we can defend ourselves from disaster by enhancing our world of wonders.

My twenties were painful. You had to go out to nightclubs. I love not having to pretend to enjoy those things anymore.

I would love to do a film with a lot of humor in it: a comedy with pain instead of a painful film with some comedy.

Painful breakups can have profound effects on the body and mind.

Plays are painful. But the very act of writing is a basic freedom denied some women. Some would call it a privilege. So what’s a little pain?

The hardest thing that I had to do every day as a working single parent was child care, to have to leave my child with people that I did not know and hope everything was OK, that was the most painful part of every day.

Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating.

My own faith was nurtured by my grandmother and her clinging deeply to her faith when she was dying a painful and slow death from cancer.

For me, writing in public is actually super energizing and so much fun. Especially when writing can typically be really painful and certainly hard, and often, you’re staring at the page and thinking, like, ‘Uh, is this any good? What am I doing?’