Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.
H. G. Wells

Affliction is a school of virtue; it corrects levity, and interrupts the confidence of sinning.
Francis Atterbury

Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
John Donne

Affliction is not sent in vain, young man, from that good God, who chastens whom he loves.
Robert Southey

Affliction is the wholesome soil of virtue, where patience, honor, sweet humility, and calm fortitude, take root and strongly flourish.
David Mallet

Affliction's sons are brothers in distress; A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!
Robert Burns

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.
Christian Nestell Bovee

Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.
Miguel de Unamuno

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.
Simone Weil

God's way of answering the Christian's prayer for more patience, experience, hope and love often is to put him into the furnace of affliction.
Richard Cecil

I am fully persuaded that thousands of our fellow-men might profit equally by a similar course to mine; but, constitutions not being all alike, a different course of treatment may be advisable for the removal of so tormenting an affliction.
William Banting

I have a particular affliction. I am unable to say a word I can't spell.
Jessye Norman

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
Max Beerbohm

If some persons died, and others did not die, death would be a terrible affliction.
Jean de la Bruyere

Iron till it be thoroughly heated is incapable to be wrought; so God sees good to cast some men into the furnace of affliction, and then beats them on his anvil into what frame he pleases.
Anne Bradstreet

Let me tell you I am better acquainted with you for a long absence, as men are with themselves for a long affliction: absence does but hold off a friend, to make one see him the truer.
Ovid

No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction.
Fay Weldon

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
James A. Baldwin

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.
Barbara Deming

Pour not on the comforts you want, but upon the mercies you have. Look rather at God's ending in afflicting, than to the measure and degree of your affliction.
Christopher Love