Pity Quotes - Page 11

• Gracefulness cannot subsist without ease; delicacy is not debility; nor must a woman be sick in order to please. Infirmity, and sickness may excite our pity, but desire and pleasure require the bloom and vigor of health.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Order, Sick, Grace

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1783). “Emilius and Sophia: Or, A New System of Education”, p.186

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• If there be a pleasure on earth which angels cannot enjoy, and which they might almost envy man the possession of, it is the power of relieving distress--if there be a pain which devils might pity man for enduring, it is the death-bed reflection that we have possessed the power of doing good, but that we have abused and perverted it to purposes of ill.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Pain, Angel, Reflection

  Charles Caleb COLTON (1849). “L.P.”, p.205

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• Self-pity shortens your life.

  Joan Rivers

  Self, Self Pity

  Joan Rivers (1997). “Bouncing back: I've survived everything-- and I mean everything-- and you can too!”, Thorndike Pr

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• Pity the poor millionaire. He'll never know the thrill of paying that final installment.

  Ann Landers

  Finals, Thrill, Poor

  Ann Landers (2017). “Since You Ask Me”, p.88, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• The Great slight the men of wit, who have nothing but wit; the men of wit despise the Great, who have nothing but greatness; the good man pities them both, if with greatness or wit they have not virtue.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Greatness, Men, Good Man

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• Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.

  Honore de Balzac

  Gratitude, Moving, Winter

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• There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.

  Honore de Balzac

  Envy, Mediocrity, Masters

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• Pity is woman's sweetest charm.

  Honore de Balzac

  Charm, Sweetest

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• No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.

  Honore de Balzac

  Society, Victim, Protect

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• How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish to be trusted, if left free, to give away enough to make people comfortable enough to give them a chance. Yet if all this is ordered for us, as to some extent it has to be, it so soon leads to tyranny. It is a very difficult problem. If only human beings had more pity, unselfishness, and justice and didn't need coercion to treat each other decently.

  Rose Macaulay

  Selfish, Compassion, Giving

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• It is a pity that so often the only way to treat girls like people seems to be to treat them like boys.

  Katharine Whitehorn

  Girl, Boys, People

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• The itch is a mean, unconfessable, ridiculous malady; one can pity someone who is suffering ; someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh.

  Andre Gide

  Mean, Laughing, Suffering

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• In prosperous fortunes be modest and wise, The greatest may fall, and the lowest may rise: But insolent People that fall in disgrace, Are wretched and nobody pities their Case.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Wise, Fall, People

  Benjamin Franklin (2005). “A Benjamin Franklin reader: the essential writings of a colonial sage ; Autobiography, Wit & wisdom”

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• Dependence is a perpetual call upon humanity, and a greater incitement to tenderness and pity than any other motive whatever.

  Joseph Addison

  Humanity, Incitement, Motive

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• There is nothing which one regards so much with an eye of mirth and pity as innocence when it has in it a dash of folly.

  Joseph Addison

  Eye, Mirth, Innocence

  Joseph Addison, Richard Steele (1854). “The Spectator”, p.282

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• A brother's sufferings claim a brother's pity.

  Joseph Addison

  Sympathy, Brother, Suffering

  Joseph Addison (1854). “The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison”, p.175

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• self-pity is better than none.

  Phyllis Diller

  Self, Self Pity

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• Through heaven and earth
  God's will moves freely, and I follow it,
  As color follows light. He overflows
  The firmamental walls with deity,
  Therefore with love; His lightnings go abroad,
  His pity may do so, His angels must,
  Whene'er He gives them charges.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Wall, Moving, Angel

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1871). “The Poetical Works of”, p.28

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• There is nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child. ... Time, self-pity, apathy, bitterness, and exhaustion can take the Christmas out of the child, but you cannot take the child out of Christmas.

  Erma Bombeck

  Christmas, Morning, Children

  Erma Bombeck (2011). “I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression”, p.119, Fawcett

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• But a rascal of a child (that age is without pity).
  [Fr., Mais un pripon d'enfant (cet age est sans pitie).

  Jean de La Fontaine

  Children, Childhood, Age

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• O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Art, Book, Writing

  Thomas Carlyle, Rodger L. Tarr, Mark Engel (2000). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books”, p.129, Univ of California Press

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• When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man. Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more. Yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and Pleiades, are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar!

  Thomas Carlyle

  Stars, Eye, Men

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• The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration.

  Leigh Hunt

  Running, Laughter, Drama

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• self-sacrifice is one of a woman's seven deadly sins (along with self-abuse, self-loathing, self-deception, self-pity, self-serving, and self-immolation).

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Sacrifice, Self, Deception

  Sarah Ban Breathnach (2009). “Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self”, p.98, Hachette UK

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• Pity only on fresh objects stays, but with the tedious sight of woes decays.

  John Dryden

  Sight, Decay, Woe

  John Dryden (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of John Dryden (Illustrated)”, p.1745, Delphi Classics

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