Daily Inspiration Quote by David Viscott

Viscott is trying to rebrand pain as information, not punishment. The line pivots on a clinical metaphor: afflictions are "evils in themselves" (he grants the obvious so he doesn't sound like a motivational grifter), but they become useful because they function like symptoms. In a medical frame, symptoms are unpleasant yet diagnostic; ignoring them feels brave until the disease quietly wins. That move lets him honor suffering while still insisting it can be metabolized into insight.

The subtext is a gentle rebuke to two popular temptations: denial and drama. Denial treats distress as an interruption to be silenced with productivity, distraction, or numbing. Drama treats distress as identity: if I'm hurting, it must mean I'm doomed or uniquely broken. Viscott offers a third option that sounds practical because it borrows medicine's authority: your anxiety, depression, grief, or relational chaos may be signaling an underlying pattern, an unmet need, an old wound, a boundary you're failing to enforce. Pain becomes a messenger, not a verdict.

Context matters: as a late-20th-century psychologist writing into the self-help boom, Viscott is navigating between pop optimism and therapeutic realism. His phrasing ("disease", "cure") leans old-school, even moralistic, yet the intent is distinctly modern: self-knowledge through discomfort. The quote works because it doesn't romanticize suffering; it conscripts it. Affliction is still an "evil". The hope comes from agency: if symptoms can be read, they can also be treated.