Suffering

Suffering is positive: minimize it

• Schopenhauer (schopenhauer) — pain is positive, pleasure negative; life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom, and wisdom lies in lessening pain, not chasing happiness. Grounding: stradanie-polozhitelno, mayatnik-boli-i-skuki, tsel-svoboda-ot-boli.
• Tolstoy (tolstoy) — the suffering of a man who has come to his senses is an arrest of life at the summit of prosperity: the question "why?", which cannot be postponed and which no removal of pain resolves. Grounding: ostanovka-zhizni, vopros-zachem-nelzya-otlozhit, chetyre-vykhoda.
• Pascal (pascal) — man cannot bear to be left alone with his own wretchedness and flees it into diversion; suffering is the truth about man's condition without God. Grounding: divertissement, begstvo-ot-sebya, nichtozhestvo-i-velichie.

Suffering is a judgment: remove the opinion and the pain goes

• Epictetus (epictetus) — it is not the thing that wounds you but your judgment about the thing; suffering is removed by the therapy of judgment, not by changing the world. Grounding: tebya-ranit-suzhdenie, sudzhdeniya-ne-veshchi, terapiya-suzhdeniya.
• James Allen (james-allen) — suffering is always the consequence of wrong thought; circumstance merely reveals to a man his own character. Grounding: thought-and-circumstance, prityagivaesh-ne-to-chto-hochesh-a-to-chto-est.

Suffering as discipline and material

• Nietzsche (nietzsche) — the discipline of great suffering has produced all the elevations of humanity; hatred of suffering is hatred of the condition of growth. Grounding: stradanie-vozvyshaet, distsiplina-stradaniya, stradanie-kak-material.
• Ignatius of Loyola (ignatius) — compassion with Christ and desolation are working states of the method: in the darkness do not shift the helm, the darkness passes and teaches. Grounding: so-strastie, ostavlennost, v-temnote-ne-perekladyvay-rul.
• Hill (hill) — defeat is not a verdict but a lesson: temporary failure carries the seed of an equivalent advantage for the one who takes it apart. Grounding: learning-from-defeat, pobezhdaet-tot-kto-ne-sdaetsya.

Axis of dispute: Nietzsche against Schopenhauer — the same will, but suffering
must be affirmed as discipline, not minimized; Epictetus against both —
suffering is not in things at all but in judgment; Tolstoy against Allen — the
question "why?" is not cured by right thinking.