Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, is an experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an individual. Suffering is the basic element that makes up the negative valence of affective phenomena.
Suffering may be qualified as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and frequency of occurrence usually compound that of intensity. Attitudes toward suffering may vary widely, in the sufferer or other people, according to how much it is regarded as avoidable or unavoidable, useful or useless, deserved or undeserved.
Suffering occurs in the lives of sentient beings in numerous manners, and often dramatically. As a result, many fields of human activity are concerned, from their own points of view, with some aspects of suffering. These aspects may include the nature of suffering, its processes, its origin and causes, its meaning and significance, its related personal, social, and cultural behaviors, its remedies, management, and uses.
Read more about Suffering: Terminology, Philosophy, Religion, Arts and Literature, Social Sciences, Biology, Neurology, Psychology, Health Care, Relief and Prevention in Society, Uses
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... Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, is an experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an ... Suffering is the basic element that makes up the negative valence of affective phenomena ... Suffering may be qualified as physical or mental ...
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... People make use of suffering for specific social or personal purposes in many areas of human life, as can be seen in the following instances ... literature, or entertainment, people may use suffering for creation, for performance, or for enjoyment ... Entertainment particularly makes use of suffering in blood sports, violence in the media, or violent video games ...
Famous quotes containing the word suffering:
“Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I thought I alone suffered,
but suffering is everywhere.
When I went on the housetop
I saw its fire in every home.”
—Farid (13th cent.)
“The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand had witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)