Passages about evil and suffering

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

Two loves, then, have made two cities.

Remove justice, and what is a kingdom but a great band of robbers?

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in!

Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe

That to the height of this great argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust. Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast.

Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Stay a while! You are so beautiful!

Poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

They make a desert and call it peace.

The histories of Tiberius and Caligula, of Claudius and Nero, were falsified through cowardice while they flourished, and composed, when they fell, under the influence of still rankling hatreds.

It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, I only most respectfully return Him the ticket.

Why hast Thou come now to hinder us?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Am I my brother's keeper?

Of all creatures that have breath and understanding, we women are the most wretched.

I would rather stand three times in the line of battle than give birth once.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.

I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on th' other.

The nature of an individual substance is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to comprehend and to allow the deduction of all the predicates of the subject to which the notion is attributed.

Every substance is like a complete world and like a mirror of God or of the whole universe, which each one expresses in its own way.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge.

There is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed.

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.

Man has become a kind of prosthetic God.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in.

I am not what I am.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

In this best of all possible worlds, everything is for the best.

It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles.

Call me Ishmael.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

It was unearthly, and the men were. No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it, this suspicion of their not being inhuman.

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

Behold what I, a god, suffer at the hands of gods.

In one short word, learn the whole of it: every art that mortals have comes from Prometheus.

I know that by nature you are not the sort to say such things or to devise mischief. But the prize of victory is sweet to win, so bring yourself to do it, and we shall be shown to be just another time.

Everything becomes disgust when a man abandons his own nature and does what does not befit him.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; / All Discord, Harmony not understood; / All partial Evil, universal Good: / And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever IS, is RIGHT.

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

If you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

I didn't kill a human being, I killed a principle.

An extraordinary man has the right, that is, not an official right, but an inner right, to decide in his own conscience to overstep certain obstacles.

For half a century the housewives of Pont-l'Eveque envied Madame Aubain her servant Felicite.

And when she breathed her last, she thought she saw, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.

The hymn opens by praising Inanna as mistress of all the divine powers, clothed in terror, the great lady who makes heaven tremble and earth quake, a goddess whose dominion extends over war and destruction as fully as over any other domain of divine power.

Enheduanna describes being driven from her temple by the rebel Lugal-Ane, who strips her of her office and her regalia, and states that she called out to her own god Nanna for help and received no answer, as if he did not care that his own priestess had been so thoroughly humiliated.

They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.

But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!

Hecuba learns that her daughter Cassandra, the prophetess whose warnings no one ever believed, has been allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine, a fate Cassandra herself receives not with despair but with a wild, prophetic joy the other characters find deeply unsettling.

Andromache, widow of Hector, learns she is being given to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, the very man responsible for her husband's death, and must accept this fate while still grieving Hector and now facing the additional horror of her young son's impending execution.

Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, old age is suffering, disease is suffering, death is suffering, union with what is unpleasant is suffering, separation from what is pleasant is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering.

Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of the cause of suffering: it is that craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and passion, seeking delight now here, now there, the craving for pleasure, the craving for existence, the craving for non-existence.

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.

Jesus, observing his disciples engaged in conventional prayer and thanksgiving over bread, laughs at them directly, and when they ask why, tells them that they do not know him and that their worship, however sincere, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding rather than genuine spiritual insight.

Jesus takes Judas aside privately and reveals to him alone an elaborate account of the cosmos's actual origin, describing the great invisible Spirit and the lesser, ignorant powers, including a figure called Saklas, who actually created and rule over the material world the other disciples mistakenly worship as divine.

For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God comes to our realm, although he was not far from us before. For no part of creation is left void of him; he has filled all things everywhere, while remaining present to his Father.

He took to himself a body capable of death, in order that it, participating in the Word who is above all, might be sufficient for death on behalf of all, and might, because of the Word who was come to dwell in it, remain incorruptible.

Nothing makes the mind a companion of desire in seeking to enjoy such things except its own will and free choice. There is no other cause of evildoing than this.

Whatever it is by which the number four is understood to be greater than three, this is unchangeable and common to all who understand it, and so it cannot be private to any one mind, but must be common truth open to all rational minds alike.

I am Fortune. Inconstancy is my very essence, it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever-changing circle.

No man can ever truly be secure until he has been abandoned by Fortune.

The poem begins by praising the awakening mind, confesses faults and generates the resolve, establishing the bodhisattva vow to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings as the practice's central organizing and motivating principle throughout.

The chapter on patience argues against anger, and the meditation chapter teaches the exchange of self and other, offering a genuinely concrete practical technique for cultivating compassion through systematic contemplative exercise rather than abstract aspiration alone.

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

Often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked.

Julian describes seeing all creation as a small thing the size of a hazelnut, resting safely in the palm of God's hand, and understanding through this vision that everything exists and continues to exist only because God loves it and actively sustains it in being.

Julian relates the parable of the lord and the servant, in which a faithful servant falls into a ditch while hastening to do his lord's will, and the lord regards him not with anger but with compassion, reframing human sin's relationship to divine judgment through this unconventional parable.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, tells the audience he is determined to prove a villain and sets out to remove everyone between himself and the throne, giving the play's central antagonist unsettling self-aware intelligence about his own moral status.

He woos Lady Anne over the corpse of the husband he killed, has his brother Clarence drowned in a wine butt, and has his young nephews murdered in the Tower after seizing the crown, escalating villainy through calculated rhetorical and physical cruelty.

Returning from war to Messina, the young lord Claudio falls for Hero, the governor's daughter, while Benedick and Hero's cousin Beatrice resume a running battle of insults their friends will need only manipulate into acknowledged mutual attraction.

The prince's bastard brother Don John stages a scene that makes Claudio think Hero is unfaithful, and Claudio denounces her at the altar, staging a genuinely brutal public humiliation the play's title ironically frames as much ado about nothing.

The widowed Duchess secretly marries her steward Antonio, wooing him herself since he cannot woo her, against the wishes of her brothers, who have set the malcontent Bosola to spy on her.

Ferdinand torments the imprisoned Duchess with a dead man's hand, wax figures of her husband and children, and a chorus of madmen, and then has Bosola strangle her, her children and her maid; she dies saying, I am Duchess of Malfi still.

Guaman Poma catalogues, parish by parish, the specific abuses colonial priests commit against the Andean communities under their care: extorting unpaid labor and cloth, beating and imprisoning those who complain, keeping women and fathering children, selling the sacraments, and seizing the property of the dead.

Guaman Poma insists that his complaint is not against Christianity itself, which he professes sincerely, but against the specific men who administer it, whose actual conduct makes genuine Christian practice and community life impossible for the Andeans placed under their authority.

Don Juan, a nobleman who takes any woman he wants and believes in nothing but arithmetic, abandons his new wife Elvire and moves from seduction to seduction with his servant Sganarelle protesting behind him throughout the play's entire action.

Don Juan mocks a beggar's faith, cheats a creditor, rejects his father's pleas, and finally adopts hypocrisy as a calculated strategy rather than experiencing any genuine change of heart, escalating his cruelty toward everyone around him.

The Discourse on Metaphysics, addressed initially to Arnauld and developed further through their subsequent correspondence, works through Leibniz's central concept of substance, establishing the philosophical groundwork that his mature theory of monads would later build upon and extend.

Leibniz describes the monad as simple, indivisible and windowless, containing no parts through which anything could genuinely enter or leave, yet argues that each monad nonetheless represents the entire universe from its own unique perspective, a striking combination of total isolation and total representation.

Conway argues that all creatures, from the lowest apparently inanimate matter to the highest angelic spirits, are fundamentally one kind of substance differing only in degree of vitality and perfection, so that nothing in creation is ever truly dead or wholly without some capacity for life and feeling.

She rejects Descartes's division of the world into dead, mechanical matter and immaterial thinking substance, arguing that mere dead matter, entirely without any capacity for life or perception, could never actually move or act at all, and so cannot be what the physical world is actually made of.

Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen. / Come, you daughters, help me lament.

Und die Hohepriester und Ältesten hielten einen Rat über Jesum, dass sie ihn töteten. / And the chief priests and elders took counsel against Jesus, that they might kill him.

A reasonable public-spirited projector calculates that Ireland's poverty could be relieved if the children of the poor were fattened and sold at one year old as food for the rich, working through the economics with genuine apparent care.

The projector recommends recipes and lists the advantages to landlords, parents and the nation, dismissing gentler remedies as impractical beside his own carefully reasoned solution.

Jenner's 1798 Inquiry reports his 1796 experiment inoculating eight-year-old James Phipps with matter taken from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes's hand, and describes his subsequent confirmation that the boy had become immune to smallpox itself, the experiment's central and most audacious claim.

The 1798 Inquiry reports twenty-three total cases beyond the initial Phipps experiment, building a broader evidentiary base for Jenner's proposal that cowpox infection protects against the considerably deadlier disease of smallpox.

Lamb argues that acting reduces Hamlet's inward, constantly qualifying thought to definite physical gesture and vocal delivery, foreclosing the interpretive openness a reader's own imagination can sustain indefinitely when encountering the same language on the page rather than embodied by a specific actor.

Lamb contends that Lear's storm and his descent into madness cannot be adequately represented onstage without becoming either painful to watch or genuinely absurd, since the physical spectacle of staged madness risks undermining the sublime terror the same material achieves when read privately in the mind.

Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in the forest by parents who can no longer feed them, follow a trail of breadcrumbs that birds eat before they can retrace their steps, and are lured by hunger to a house made of bread, cake and sugar belonging to a witch who intends to eat them.

Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters mutilate their own feet, cutting off toe and heel, in a failed attempt to fit the golden slipper, and at the wedding birds peck out the stepsisters' eyes as punishment for their cruelty, a considerably harsher conclusion than most later popular versions retain.

Count Francesco Cenci, a nobleman whose crimes the Pope repeatedly pardons for money, celebrates the deaths of two of his sons and then rapes his daughter Beatrice, escalating cruelty that institutional authority has repeatedly enabled rather than restrained.

With her stepmother and brother, Beatrice hires assassins to kill her father, choosing private violence as the only available response after institutional authority has repeatedly failed to check or punish his crimes against her and her family.

Don Rodrigo, who has made a bet on seducing Lucia, frightens the parish priest Don Abbondio into refusing to perform the wedding, exposing how thoroughly local aristocratic power could override both church authority and ordinary people's basic legal standing under Spanish colonial rule.

Lucia is kidnapped for Don Rodrigo by a great criminal known as the Unnamed, whose sudden and genuine religious conversion, occurring while he holds her captive, transforms him unexpectedly from her actual kidnapper into her liberator, freeing her rather than delivering her to Don Rodrigo.

Walker argues that American slavery is the cruellest in history, worse than that of the Egyptians, the Romans or the Spanish, because those masters never denied that their slaves were human beings.

He names enforced ignorance, a corrupted Christianity that preaches obedience, and the colonisation scheme to remove free Blacks to Africa as the three supports of slavery, and attacks each in turn.

But a mermaid has no tears, and so she suffers so much more.

But he has nothing on at all!

Holmes assembles reported cases in which a single doctor or midwife attended a run of women who died of childbed fever while other colleagues practicing in the same town during the same period saw no such pattern among their own patients, establishing a clear correlation between specific attendants and disease clusters.

He argues directly that childbed fever is carried from patient to patient on the hands and clothes of the physicians and midwives attending them, identifying the very people meant to be helping these women as the actual, unwitting vector transmitting a fatal disease between them.

The Raven, Poe's best known poem, follows a bereaved scholar who questions a bird that answers only Nevermore, the poem's entire structure subordinated to building toward this single repeated word as its unified, devastating emotional effect.

Annabel Lee, Ulalume and Lenore, elegies for dead women, work out Poe's conviction that the death of a beautiful woman was poetry's most poetic subject, testing this claim across multiple formal variations rather than treating it as mere morbid fixation.

Lisbeth Fischer, being still unmarried at forty-two, was nicknamed Cousin Bette in the family.

Vice always finds a defender to plead for it, whereas virtue, when it has no reward, finds nothing but incredulity.

On the Sufferings of the World argues that pain is the positive fact of life and pleasure only its absence, inverting the ordinary common-sense assumption about which condition requires explanation and treating suffering as existence's fundamental default state.

On the Vanity of Existence and On Suicide engage directly with self-destruction as a genuine philosophical question rather than a topic requiring polite avoidance, treating existence's fundamental worthlessness as demanding honest confrontation rather than comfortable denial.

Jacobs describes how her owner, Dr Flint, began sexually pursuing her at the age of fifteen, a pursuit she could not escape through ordinary means given her legal status as his property, establishing the specific sexual danger that drives the narrative's subsequent choices and actions.

Jacobs takes a white lover and bears two children by him, a calculated decision made specifically to escape Dr Flint's ongoing sexual pursuit, a choice she narrates with unflinching honesty despite knowing it would expose her to considerable moral judgment from contemporary readers.

Lincoln observes that both sides in the war read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, each invoking His aid against the other, refusing to let Northern listeners hear the war's outcome as simple divine vindication of one side's righteousness over the other's wickedness.

Lincoln names slavery directly as the war's actual cause, stating plainly what political caution had kept him from saying so directly for years, and suggests that God may be exacting from the whole nation, North and South together, payment for the wealth piled up by two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.

Myshkin arrives in Petersburg from years in a Swiss clinic for his epilepsy, and his immediate, unguarded honesty with strangers on the train, discussing his own illness and his own nature without any of the usual social concealment, establishes from the novel's opening pages exactly how out of step his candor is with ordinary social performance.

Nastasya Filippovna, treated for years as a possession bought and sold among wealthy men who competed over her, throws a large sum of money offered for her hand directly into the fire in front of assembled guests, a gesture of self-destructive defiance the novel presents as her clearest assertion of dignity against her own commodification.

Billy Budd, a handsome and innocent young sailor pressed from a merchant ship onto the warship Bellipotent, becomes the object of master-at-arms John Claggart's unexplained hatred, a mystery the narrative never resolves into any specific comprehensible grievance or motive.

Claggart falsely accuses Billy of plotting mutiny before Captain Vere, and Billy, who stammers when agitated, cannot answer the accusation verbally and instead strikes Claggart dead with a single blow, his own physical limitation directly producing the fatal act.

Religion, for the purposes of the lectures, means the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

The healthy-minded refuse to see evil and live in the sunshine; the sick soul cannot look away from it, and James, drawing on Tolstoy and Bunyan and a case he later admitted was his own, judges the sick soul's view the more complete.

In What Men Live By a shoemaker takes in a naked stranger who proves to be an angel sent to learn three things: what dwells in men, what is not given to men, and what men live by, the last being love.

In How Much Land Does a Man Need the peasant Pahom is offered all the land he can walk round in a day, walks too far in his greed, and dies at the finish, needing only six feet from head to heel.

In an Austrian village in 1590 three boys meet a beautiful youth who calls himself Satan, nephew of the fallen angel, who makes a tiny castle and its people out of clay and then crushes them when they annoy him.

Satan shows the boys the wretchedness of human life, the cruelty of the moral sense, which alone makes it possible to choose wrong, and the meaninglessness of any human choice, each life a chain fixed by its first link.

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect, an impossible event the story reports without explanation or metaphor, in flat, matter-of-fact prose that treats the transformation as an ordinary domestic problem rather than a horrifying impossibility.

Unable to go to work, Gregor watches his family's response evolve across the story, from initial horror at his transformed state, through a gradually settled sense of burden as they adjust to his presence, and finally toward open relief once he eventually dies.

Freud argues that we need not be greatly surprised that civilized nations should, under the pressure of war, reveal themselves capable of such cruelty and disregard for law, since civilization has never actually destroyed the primitive, aggressive impulses inherited from an earlier stage of human development, only overlaid and restrained them.

He observes that in our unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality, and that ordinary life proceeds as though this were straightforwardly true, death acknowledged abstractly as a fact but genuinely excluded from how we actually anticipate and plan our own futures.

As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory.

There is a strange new world within the Bible, the world of God, and it is not our task to explain this strange world, to fit it into our own, but to enter it and let it question us.

War is just like love, it always finds a way. Why should it end?

Whoever wants to survive should not resist evil. Whoever wants to survive should keep quiet.

Three people are shown into a windowless Second Empire drawing room with no mirrors and the lights permanently on: Garcin, a journalist shot for desertion, Inez, a postal clerk who drove her lover to suicide, and Estelle, a society woman who killed her baby.

They wait for a torturer and gradually work out that there isn't one, because each of them is equipped to torment the other two, relocating hell entirely within interpersonal dependency rather than any external supernatural apparatus.

Levi describes the tattooing and stripping of the prisoners upon arrival at Monowitz, a systematic process removing names, clothing and every visible marker of individual identity, replacing them with a number that becomes the prisoner's only recognized designation within the camp's entire operating system.

Levi describes the camp's internal economy in precise detail, the trading and stealing of bread, the informal hierarchies and favors that determined actual survival chances, a system he observes with the same careful attention he might once have brought to analyzing a chemical process.

The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable, even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them, whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state.

We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.

Nothing to be done.

We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

A Georgia family sets out on a car trip to Florida, over the objections of the grandmother, who would rather visit relatives in Tennessee and who has read that an escaped killer called The Misfit is loose, a detail she raises manipulatively rather than out of genuine caution.

Her insistence on seeing a plantation house she remembers leads the family down a dirt road, into a ditch, and into the hands of The Misfit and his men, converting her small vanity into the catalyst for the family's entire catastrophe.