Suffering & Evil

From “the military school of life”.

For resilience, post-traumatic growth.

Meaning makes suffering bearable. Viktor Frankl made it the motto of Man’s Search for Meaning.

For meaning and endurance.

For art as justification of existence.

Revisiting the Roman ruins of his youth after years of war and darkness.

For resilience and inner light.

⚠ Often embellished into a longer motivational passage that Camus never wrote.

We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply.

For why literature matters; against comfortable reading.

For impermanence and urgency.

For reconciliation and non-violence.

God, perfectly good and wise, chose the best possible world, evils included.

For optimism and theodicy — usually with Voltaire’s irony.

⚠ The exact phrase is Voltaire’s mocking formula in Candide; Leibniz argues the thesis.

For hedonic treadmill, pessimism, the restlessness of desire.

Against complacency; for the duty to remember others’ suffering.

For perseverance after failure.

For persistence — honestly understood.

⚠ Beckett’s context is bleak, not motivational — it is about the impossibility of art succeeding.

For endurance without hope.

For dark comedy.

Milton, gone blind, wonders how he can serve God.

For patience, disability, and unseen contributions.

The first śloka — grief becoming verse.

For the origin of poetry in compassion.

Ippolit mockingly reports that the Prince once said this. Myshkin never says it on stage; the line is asked about, not affirmed.

For the redemptive power of beauty and art. Solzhenitsyn built his Nobel lecture around it.

⚠ Often quoted as Dostoevsky’s own creed. In the novel it is reported second-hand, with irony.

After listing the tortures of children, Ivan refuses a harmony bought with their tears.

For the problem of evil, or for rejecting any utopia whose price is innocent suffering.

On the little girl locked in the freezing privy by her parents.

When abstractions are used to justify concrete cruelty.

From Zosima’s discourses, recorded by Alyosha.

For a non-literal hell; love as the meaning of life.

In conversation with Porfiry about his article on extraordinary men.

For the price of depth and sensitivity.

The most famous opening in the Russian novel.

For the variety of failure versus the sameness of success — “the Anna Karenina principle”.

His first soliloquy — wishing “this too too solid flesh would melt”.

For depression, ennui, Weltschmerz.

The blinded Gloucester on the cruelty of the cosmos.

For the problem of evil, cosmic indifference, tragic fate.

In the storm, Lear looks at the half-naked “Poor Tom” and tears off his own clothes.

For what humans are without culture, property and status — the existential condition laid bare.

Lear holding the dead Cordelia. A line of pure trochees — the heartbeat of grief.

For irreversible loss.

The old king of Troy kneels before Achilles to ransom Hector’s body.

For reconciliation with an enemy, the humility of grief, shared humanity.

Achilles, in his rage after Patroclus’s death, refuses mercy to the young Lycaon.

For the terrible equality of death, and grief turned to cruelty.

Disguised as a beggar in his own house, Odysseus restrains his fury at the maids’ betrayal.

For patience, self-command, endurance. Plato quotes it in the Republic and Phaedo.

For unwelcome truths and the burden of knowledge.

The play’s closing words, echoing Solon’s warning to Croesus in Herodotus.

For the fragility of happiness and fortune.

The last line of the inscription over the gate of Hell.

For hopeless places — usually with dark humour.

⚠ Often misquoted as “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”.

Dante’s ancestor prophesies his exile.

For exile, dependence, homesickness.

For ingratitude, especially of children.

Lear’s daughters strip him of his retinue, asking why he needs any knights at all.

For human dignity beyond bare necessity.