Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
Source: Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Topic
Pain in this collection is almost always in conversation with something else — love, courage, patience, time. Caesar's volunteer-to-die-but-not-to-endure-pain observation is among the most psychologically acute entries in the entire database: people will make grand gestures but resist sustained difficulty. Mother Teresa's paradox — I love until it hurts and then there is no hurt, only more love — is the mystical answer that will satisfy some readers and unsettle others. Einstein's hot-stove-and-pretty-girl relativity of experience is the comic reduction that works because it is genuinely true about attention and pain. The proverb pair — barking dogs seldom bite, once bitten twice shy — cover the two stages of pain's social instruction. Sophocles' one-word-frees-us-of-all-pain — love — is the closing philosophical claim. What this collection refuses is the motivational-poster reading of pain as something that simply makes you stronger. Pain is real, it is specific, it leaves marks. The most honest quotes here acknowledge what it costs rather than claiming what it builds.
Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk