Here are the top 210 pain quotes to motivate you to overcome pain and face the situation with strength.
Everyone, whether physically or psychologically, suffers from pain at some point in their life. It is a fact of life that we must accept and confront. But the more we go through it, the stronger we’ll be in the long run.
We’re optimistic that this collection will help you learn more about being hurt and how to deal with it. Share these quotes with your friends, family, and loved ones to inspire them.
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Best Pain Quotes
1. “It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” – Chuck Palahniuk
2. “I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.” – Haruki Murakami
3. “The marks humans leave are too often scars.” – John Green
4. “Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.” – Fight Club
5. “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller
6. “Sit with the pain until it passes, and you will be calmer for the next one.” – Naval Ravikant
7. “People go through so much pain trying to avoid pain.” – Neil Strauss
8. “Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.” – J.K. Rowling
9. “Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.” – David Richo
10. ”Pain has its own noble joy, when it starts a strong consciousness of life, from a stagnant one.” – John Sterling
11. ”Sometimes, you must hurt in order to know, fall in order to grow, lose in order to gain, because life’s greatest lessons are learnt through pain.” – Nagato
12. ”Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it; there is no way of life.” – Angelina Jolie
13. “It is when we hurt that we learn.” – Steve Maraboli
14. “Stay focused on your purpose, not your pain.” – Ranal Currie
15. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” – James Baldwin
Famous Pain Quotes
16. “Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain.” – Bob Dylan
17. “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.” – Jim Rohn
18. “Nothing pains some people more than having to think.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
19. “One thing you can’t hide—is when you’re crippled inside.” – John Lennon
20. “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” – Buddha
21. “It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.” – Theodore Roosevelt
22. “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.” – Thomas Jefferson
23. “Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease of pain.” – Charlie Chaplin
24. “Life is pain, so live it up while you can.” – Ernest Hemingway
25. “It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.” – Julius Caesars a
26. “My pain may be the reason for somebody’s laugh. But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody’s pain.” – Charlie Chaplin
27. “No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful the experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.” – Dalai Lama
28. “Every pain is a gift. Every pain is an opportunity.” – Maxime Lagacé
29. “What hurts us is what heals us.” – Paulo Coelho
30. “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” – Marcus Aurelius
Pain Quotes to Inspire You
31. “Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” – Jim Morrison
32. “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” – Lance Armstrong
33. “Time doesn’t heal emotional pain, you need to learn how to let go.” – Roy T. Bennett
34. “It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.” – Marquis de Sade
35. “One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.” – Sophocles
36. “New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” – Lao Tzu
37. “Don’t let pain define you, let it refine you.” – Tim Fargo
38. “Frustration, although quite painful at times, is a very positive and essential part of success.” – Bo Bennett
39. “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.” – Ovid
40. “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” – Oprah Winfrey
41. “After the rain, the sun will reappear. There is life. After the pain, the joy will still be here.” – Walt Disney
42. “Failure gave me strength. Pain was my motivation.” – Michael Jordan
43. “Often, it’s the deepest pain which empowers you to grow into your highest self.” – Karen Salmansohn
44. “Don’t get lost in your pain, know that one day your pain will become your cure.” – Rumi
45. “Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Beneath its breath, souls develop.” – Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Quotes to Highlight How Essential Pain Is in Life
46. “I don’t believe there is pleasure in life. I believe there is only relief of pain—we have to suffer to be on top.” – Georges St-Pierre
47. “When it hurts, observe. Life is trying to teach you something.” – Anita Krizzan
48. “Pain nourishes courage. You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.” – Mary Tyler Moore
49. “You must go through that short-term pain to reach long-term gains. A meaningful life is about growth, not comfort.” – Maxime Lagacé
50. “There are no gains without pain.” – Benjamin Franklin
51. “The pain will leave once it has finished teaching you.” – Anonymous
52. “We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” – Kenji Miyazawa
53. “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” – Kahlil Gibran
54. “Pain is a great motivator.” – Naval Ravikant
55. “Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.” – Cesare Pavese
56. “You may have had unfair things happen to you, but the depth of your pain is an indication of the height of your future.” – Joel Osteen
57. “Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term, so you can get paid in the long term.” – Naval Ravikant
58. “It’s better to feel pain than nothing at all.” – Anonymous
59. “Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.” – Neil Gaiman
60. “Sacrifice today for tomorrow’s betterment, you are willing to pay those payments with pain because pain is just a message when you are fixing something that’s insufficient in your life.” – Greg Plitt
Meaningful Quotes That Will Help You Accept and Face the Existence of Pain
61. “That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.” – John Green
62. “Make friends with pain and you’ll never be alone.” – Ken Chlouber
63. “The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.” – Charles Dickens
64. “Along with pain comes satisfaction and with satisfaction comes relief.” – Maxime Lagacé
65. “It hurts because it matters.” – John Green
66. “Are you facing or avoiding your pain? Are you caring for your emotions or are you making yourself busy? Learn to wait and embrace your suffering. Fleeing it will simply bring more confusion. Facing it will bring clarity.” – Maxime Lagacé
67. “We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can evolve in a state of joy and inspiration.” – Joe Dispenza
68. “The pain you feel today will be the strength you feel tomorrow.” – Anonymous
69. “Pain introduces you to your highest self.” – Paul Domenick
70. “When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.” – Jane Austen
71. “He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that’s what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.” – Hannah Harrington
72. “These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.” – Rumi
73. “Pain makes me grow. Growing is what I want. Therefore, for me, pain is pleasure.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger
74. “When pain brings you down, don’t be silly, don’t close your eyes and cry, you just might be in the best position to see the sun shine.” – Alanis Morissette
75. “If you can learn to endure pain, you can survive anything. Some people learn to embrace it, to love it. Some endure it through drowning it in sorrow, or by making themselves forget. Others turn it into anger.” – Sarah J. Maas
Pain Quotes to Make You Stronger and Braver
76. ”I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.” – Haruki Murakami
77. “Pain makes you stronger. Fear makes you braver. Heartbreak makes you wiser.” – Drake
78. ”Pain is nothing compared to what it feels like to quit.” – Anonymous
79. “Sometimes, pain can drive a man harder than pleasure.” – Don Ingall
80. “Pain can be controlled, you just disconnect it.” – James Cameron
81. “The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill toughens our minds.” – Robert Greene
82. “Of pain, you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain, there are no heroes.” – George Orwell
83. ”Pain is a part of growing up. It’s how we learn.” – Dan Brown
84. “The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.” – Publilius Syrus
85. “Pain is temporary. It may last for a minute, or an hour or a day, or even a year. But eventually, it will subside. And something else takes its place.” – Eric Thomas
86. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
87. “I’m willing to accept any kind of pain to win a race.” – Rick Wohlhutter
88. “The more you’re hurt, the more you’ll change.” – Anonymous
89. “When you can’t remember why you’re hurt, that’s when you’re healed.” – Jane Fonda
90. “God gave us pain to remind us we are alive, so we will learn to value the joys and beauty of the world.” – Tom Corr
Pain Quotes That Teach Us Important Life Lessons
91. “Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.” – Robert Gary Lee
92. “When I planted my pain in the field of patience it bore fruit of happiness.” – Kahlil Gibran
93. “Handling our suffering is an art. If we know how to suffer, we suffer much less, and we’re no longer afraid of being overwhelmed by the suffering inside.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
94. “Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.” – Joseph Campbell
95. “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” – Carl Jung
96. “I can’t stress this enough, but the pain is part of the process. It’s important to feel it.” – Mark Manson
97. “Don’t be scared, women can handle the worst kind of pain. You’ll find out one day.” – Gayle Forman
98. ”Pain pays the income of each precious thing.” – William Shakespeare
99. “Just like there’s always time for pain, there’s always time for healing.” – Jennifer Brown
100. “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” – Khalil Gibran
101. ”If you can sit with your pain, listen to your pain and respect your pain—in time you will move through your pain.” – Bryant McGill
102. ”The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.” – George Gordon Noel Byron
103. ”No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.” – William Penn
104. ”All pain is either severe or slight, if slight, it is easily endured; if severe, it will, without doubt, be brief.” – Cicero
105. “At the end of pain is success.” – Eric Thomas
Straightforward Pain Quotes That Will Slap You With Reality
106. “Much of your pain is self-chosen.” – Kahlil Gibran
107. “Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.” – Anonymous
108. “You have to die a few times before you can really live.” – Charles Bukowski
109. “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
110. “We are more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
111. “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free will involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” – C.S. Lewis
112. “Pain can change you, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a bad change.” – Anonymous
113. “If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.” – Angela Duckworth
114. “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.” – Ernest Hemingway
115. “We can never judge the lives of others because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation.” – Paulo Coelho
116. “Forgetting about our mistakes and our wounds isn’t enough to make them disappear.” – Ai Yazawa
117. ”You will never know the power of yourself until someone hurts you badly.” – Anonymous
118. “Love is the sweetest pain inside.” – Tarkan
119. “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” – Zora Neale Hurston
120. “We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” – Alan Watts
Quotes That Reveal What People Learn From Pain
121. “Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.” – Lev Grossman
122. “It is when I struggle that I strengthen. It is when challenged to my core that I learn the depth of who I am.” – Steve Maraboli
123. “Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have—life itself.” – Walter Anderson
124. “Forget about winning and losing, forget about pride and pain.” – Bruce Lee
125. “The worst wounds, the deadliest of them, aren’t the ones people see on the outside. They’re the ones that make us bleed internally.” – Sherrilyn Kenyon
126. “Sometimes, pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.” – Benjamin Alire Sáenz
127. ”Transformation without work and pain, without suffering, without a sense of loss is just an illusion of true change.” – William P. Young
128. “What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain, and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside.” – Wayne Dyer
129. “Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.” – Kahlil Gibran
130. “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” – James Baldwin
131. “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.” – C.S. Lewis
132. “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.” – William Goldman
133. “Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.” – Milton Erickson
134. “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.” – Lois Lowry
135. “There’s no love without pain.” – Irving Stone
Thought-Provoking Pain Quotes
136. “We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to.” – C.S. Lewis
137. “Strange how we decorate pain.” – Margaret Atwood
138. “The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives—the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.” – Norman Cousins
139. “He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” – Dr. Seuss
140. “Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.” – Aristotle
141. “Move toward resistance and pain.” – Robert Greene
142. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” – C.S. Lewis
143. “Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.” – Carl Jung
144. “There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” – Laurell K. Hamilton
145. “If experience is the mother of wisdom, pain is the father.” – Thibaut
146. “Passion is the bridge that takes you from pain to change.” – Frida Kahlo
147. “The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.” – Eckhart Tolle
148. “To hurt is as human as to breathe.” – J.K. Rowling
149. “You are the love and joy beneath the pain.” – Eckhart Tolle
150. “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.” – Erma Bombeck
Quotes That Zoom in on the Pain You Might Encounter in Love and Relationships
151. “It’s amazing how someone can break your heart and you can still love them with all the little pieces.” – Ella Harper
152. “Falling in love is like holding a candle. Initially, it lightens up the world around you. Then it starts melting and hurts you. Finally, it goes off and everything is darker than ever and all you are left with is the—burn!” – Syed Arshad
153. “You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.” – J.K. Rowling
154. “Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.” – Leonardo da Vinci
155. “Our greatest joy and our greatest pain come in our relationships with others.” – Stephen R. Covey
156. “It hurts to leave a light on for nobody.” – Graham Foust
157. “There is one pain, I often feel, which you will never know. It’s caused by the absence of you.” – Ashleigh Brilliant
158. “The surest way to hurt yourself is to give up on love, just because it didn’t work out the first time.” – Amanda Howells
159. “Breathing is hard. When you cry so much, it makes you realize that breathing is hard.” – David Levithan
160. “Relationships are like glass. Sometimes it’s better to leave them broken than try to hurt yourself putting it back together.” – Anonymous
161. “If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.” – C.S. Lewis
162. “Where there is love, there is vulnerability to pain.” – Laura Ramirez
163. “I suppose that since most of our hurts come through relationships so will our healing, and I know that grace rarely makes sense for those looking in from the outside.” – William P. Young
164. ”One of the most courageous decisions you’ll ever make is to finally let go of what is hurting your heart and soul.” – Anonymous
165. “Pain is like a love affair. When it’s over, it’s over.” – Elyse Sommer
Heartfelt Pain Quotes to Help You Understand What It’s Like to Be Hurt
166. “We don’t even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.” – Charles Bukowski
167. “The prettiest smile hides the deepest secrets. The prettiest eyes have cried the most tears. And the kindest hearts have felt the most pain.” – Anonymous
168. “I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness.” – Henry Rollins
169. “Some old wounds never truly heal and bleed again at the slightest word.” – George R.R. Martin
170. “Where the wound has been given, there must the cure be found, if anywhere.” – Jane Austen
171. “Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.” – Rabindranath Tagore
172. “Waiting hurts. Forgetting hurts. But not knowing which decision to take can sometimes be the most painful.” – José N. Harris
173. “When the clouds get too heavy, it rains. When your pain gets too bad, you cry.” – Anonymous
174. “Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.” – Tony Robbins
175. “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” – Bell Hooks
176. ”The broken heart. You think you will die, but you keep living, day after day after terrible day.” – Charles Dickens
177. ”I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” – Mother Teresa
178. ”Anybody can laugh in joy, but the bold ones also smile in pain—knowing that pain is just like a zooming train that will soon pass by.” – RVM
179. ”The pain started years ago, but I’d lived with it for so long at that point that I’d accepted it as an inevitable part of me.” – Diwakar Sharma
180. “I always hated when my scars started to fade because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.” – Jodi Picoult
Pain Quotes That Everyone Can Relate To
181. “Beautiful are those whose brokenness gives birth to transformation and wisdom.” – John Green
182. “Life is a thorough university; pain and hardship are its distinguished professors.” – Matshona Dhliwayo
183. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” – Anais Nin
184. “The root of all suffering is attachment.” – Buddha
185. “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.” – Mahatma Gandhi
186. “The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure but to avoid pain.” – Aristotle
187. “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” – Bob Marley
188. “If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that’s a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.” – Eckhart Tolle
189. “If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible.” – Paulo Coelho
190. ”This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and—if I think of human beings I’ve known and of my own life, such as it is, I can’t recall any case of pain which didn’t, on the whole, enrich life.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
191. “The pain of the little finger is felt by the whole body.” – Filipino Proverb
192. “Top results are achieved only through pain. But eventually you like this pain.” – Juha Väätäinen
193. ”Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly—and if left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place.” – William P. Young
194. “The best way of handling pain was to study it objectively.” – Arthur C. Clarke
195. “Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, and the most gripping stories.” – Billy Graham
More Pain Quotes That Will Pique Your Interest
196. “Pain is a beautiful thing. When you feel pain, you know you’re alive.” – Criss Angel
197. “It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.” – Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
198. “If no pain, then no love. If no darkness, no light. If no risk, then no reward. It’s all or nothing. In this damn world, it’s all or nothing.” – Glennon Doyle Melton
199. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” – Aeschylus
200. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou
201. “To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!” – Charlie Chaplin
202. “Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again?” – Rosa Parks
203. “Face your fears, endure its pain and they will be re-written in the form of pride and dreams.” – Greg Plitt
204. “Smiling is the best way to face any problem, to crush every fear and to hide every pain.” – Anonymous
205. “The trick to healing from suffering, I think, is deciding that the pain was worth it.” – Aella
206. “The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.” – Jodi Picoult
207. “Knowing what it feels to be in pain, is exactly why we try to be kind to others.” – Jiraiya
208. “Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
209. “If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you’re allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.” – Shannon L. Alder
210. “Pain is sometimes the cost of a meaningful existence. I can handle that.” – Jeb Dickerson
What Did You Learn About Endurance, Forgiveness, and Healing?
One of the many challenges that life throws at us is the feeling of pain and suffering. However, we must not interpret pain negatively. In fact, it helps us in getting through life.
It’s okay to cry our hearts out when we’re in pain. We have the right to express ourselves, whether alone or with others.
Pain increases our capacity for compassion, love, and empathy. It brings us closer to others because it allows us to empathize with what they feel when in pain.
Remember that everything happens for a reason, and that’s why we just have to keep going and remind ourselves that every problem has an end. So, find the courage to face every challenge in your life as bravely and confidently as you can.
Do you have any painful experiences you learned from? Are there any other pain quotes you’d like us to add to this list? Comment down below.
