quotations about pity
Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
What is pity but the vice of kindness.
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
Pity is a deceptive emotional response to perceived suffering. Why deceptive? Because it feigns a closeness that is really distance. When unsure of ourselves and afraid to step outside the insularity of what is comfortable and reassuring about normalcy, we respond to undomesticated suffering with pity. Pity emerges from the presumption that we must do something to hide affliction when we encounter it, making it go away. This urge to cover up suffering is a symptom of shame, the shame we attribute to another whose out-of-control body elicits our own sense of shame. So we condescend to others as pathetic, feeling sorry for them in order to connect with their suffering as though it would be tragic if it were our own. It is as if to say, "There but for the grace of God go I." This feeling is not to be equated with compassion or sympathy, a feeling-along-with the other. For pity is a feeling for the other that presumes the other is unlike us, subject to a state of affairs that we are relieved to have avoided. Hence, the real focus of pity is directed toward the perceiver and not the perceived, who is left on the outside.
THOMAS E. REYNOLDS
Vulnerable Communion
When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing -- deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
letter to Thomas Hardy, March 27, 1910
Every appeal to generosity, to gratitude, to pity, is like the poor martin's best-tempered mortar applied to the unctuous marble: met by refusals polite and plausible, from the surface of a heart fat as grease and hard as stone it falls off ineffectual.
JAMES HAMILTON
The Prodigal Son
Yet, let it not be thought that I would exclude pity from the human mind. There are scarcely any that are not, to some degree, possessed of this pleasing softness; but it is at best but a short-lived passion, and seldom affords distress more than transitory assistance; with some it scarce lasts from the first impulse till the hand can be put into the pocket.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Bee, October 20, 1759
They tell us that "Pity is akin to Love;" if so, Pity must be a poor relation.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Pity is an attribute of men rather than of gods.
REGINALD PEPYS WINNINGTON-INGRAM
Sophocles: An Interpretation
We are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity--we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
Pity is like a kind of illness that comes when it is too late and you can't do anything about it.
ROBERT LALONDE
The Devil Incarnate
Pity is often an eloquent advocate.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Self-pity is like a snake that gets in your brain and lays its eggs there.
STEVE CHANDLER
100 Ways to Motivate Yourself
Pity is a form of hate, you know. And do we want to see you succeed? Maybe to an extent, but never to the point that you'll actually approach being a real competitor. Because those gains are eventually our losses, and that's just unacceptable.
MNWildcat
"B1G 2016: Why I Hate", Off Tackle Empire, April 22, 2016
Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.
RICHARD WRIGHT
Native Son
I have known men ... when they have been struggling for work and bread, never gaining enough of either to justify any real hope for the future, and I know how easy it is for a man in such a position to take the step or two that shall separate him from his self-respect, and how, when that is gone, the weight gets heavier and heavier, until he seems alone, separated, until the voice of a man passing him seems to come from a distance, and a word or touch of pity is like a hand stretched out across a gulf to him. It is more; it is like the voice of an angel speaking to him from heaven.
M. A. COURTOIS
"An Unfinished Picture", The Leisure Hour, vol. 44
It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.
H. G. WELLS
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Pity is the feeling of well-intentioned people who are unable to act.
PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER
Bumi Manusia
If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
attributed, The Life of Samuel Johnson
Self-pity is like a dog eating its own vomit or a pig rolling around in its own waste.
KEITH CAMERON SMITH
The Top 10 Distinctions Between Winners and Whiners
It is only at first that pity, like morphine, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. The first few injections do good, they soothe, they deaden the pain. But the devil of it is that the organism, the body, just like the soul, has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphine, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say 'no', and then one must not mind the other person's hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity