PITY QUOTES II
quotations about pity
Take out pity and the whole structure of our traditional morality crumbles to pieces.
FRANK THILLY
Popular Science Monthly, December 1905
Pity is sworn servant unto love:
And this be sure, wherever it begin
To make the way, it lets your master in.
SAMUEL DANIEL
The Queen's Arcadia
Pity those who don't feel anything at all.
SARAH J. MAAS
A Court of Thorns and Roses
Pity is occasioned by another's suffering but is conjoined with a disposition to keep that suffering alive and salient as a symptom of a claimed deep understanding of the despair that this earthly life engenders.
REX WELSHON
"Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals"
And pity--people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you--that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful people.
DEB CALETTI
The Secret Life of Prince Charming
I'd rather have anybody's hate than their pity.
S. E. HINTON
The Outsiders
The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
And pity, like a naked newborn babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
A woman's pity often opens the door to love.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Bartleby
Pity is like lust ... both like to masquerade as love and it's powerfully hard to know the difference when you're in the throes of it.
MICHELLE BLACK
Solomon Spring
Those who do not complain are never pitied.
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
WILLA CATHER
"On the Divide", The Troll Garden
Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?
BIBLE
Matthew 18:33
There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Pity, and forbearance, and long-sufferance, and fair interpretation, and excusing our brother, and taking in the best sense, and passing the gentlest sentence, are as certainly our duty, and owing to every person that does offend and can repent, as calling to account can be owing to the law, and are first to be paid; and he that does not so is an unjust person.
JEREMY TAYLOR
The Saturday Magazine, July 18, 1835
To be the object of pity is a situation very humiliating. For although Pity is said to be fitter to love, and a certain degree of tender affection is always mixed with it, there is no doubt at the same time such an inferiority in being pitied as is not consistent with dignity of character.
ANONYMOUS
London Magazine, February 1780
You get some of my sympathy, but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity. Get rid of it, because no one's going to like you if you feel sorry for yourself. The irony is we'll feel sorry for you, if you stop feeling sorry for yourself. Just grow up.
STEPHEN FRY
"Stephen Fry criticised for telling 'self-pitying' abuse victims to grow up", The Guardian, April 12, 2016
To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most. Men aflame with a burning charity towards their neighbours are thus enkindled because they have touched the depth of their own misery, their own apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning their newly opened eyes upon their fellows, they have seen that they also are miserable, apparential, condemned to nothingness, and they have pitied them and loved them.
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
Tragic Sense of Life
Pity is like eating mustard without beef.
AUGUSTUS JOHN CUTHBERT HARE
The Story of My Life