- 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
It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
WILLA CATHER, "On the Divide," The Troll Garden
Pity is often an eloquent advocate.
When men are about to commit, or sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.
He best can pity who has felt the woe.
- Pity the laden one; this wandering woe
- May visit you and me.
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
Pity in its embrace strangles respect.
ABRAHAM MILLER, Unmoral Maxims
Pity is always twinged with disgust.
A woman's pity often opens the door to love.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss
- And pity, like a naked newborn babe,
- Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, 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
Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them. When I am on my way to dine with a friend, and finding it late, have bid the coachman make haste, if I happen to attend when he whips his horses, I may feel unpleasantly that the animals are put to pain, but I do not wish him to desist. No, sir, I wish him to drive on.
SAMUEL JOHNSON, attributed, The Life of Samuel Johnson
Pity is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man's present calamity; but when it lighteth on such as we think have not deserved the same, the compassion is greater, because then there appeareth the more probability that the same may happen to us. For the evil that happeneth to an innocent man, may happen to every man.
THOMAS HOBBES, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic
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"
Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?
Pity is more spectator-like than compassion; we can pity people while maintaining a safe emotional distance from them.
AARON BEN-ZE'EV, The Subtlety of Emotions
If you wish me well, do not stand pitying me, but lend me some succour as fast as you can; for pity is but cold comfort when one is up to the chin in water, and within a hair's breadth of starving or drowning.
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
Take out pity and the whole structure of our traditional morality crumbles to pieces.
FRANK THILLY, Popular Science Monthly, Dec. 1905
Pity makes suffering contagious.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Antichrist
- So kind and tender Pity is,
- She pitieth even Sin!
- And fain, through Heaven's blessed gate,
- Would pass the culprit in.
J. Q. A. WOOD, "Pity 'Tis 'Tis So," Arthur's Home Magazine, Mar. 1869
- O, brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
- Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
- To worship rightly is to love each other,
- Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, The Opal
Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, "Dialectical Theories of Human Nature"
Pity and love are nearly allied.
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