„Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?“

— Emil M. Cioran

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„In philosophical anthropology, … where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.“
— Martin Buber
„In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.“
— Jean Paul Sartre
„The cross is not random suffering, but necessary suffering. The cross is not suffering that stems from natural existence; it is the suffering that comes from being Christian.“
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
„Man prides himself on being the only animal who can modify his nature, yet when he chooses to do so he is called a phony.“
— Anton LaVey
„We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.“
— Emil M. Cioran