Pity Quotes - Page 13

• [On her mastectomy:] Pity is delicious. I was crazy about the pity I got. It was the best kind, too. I did not get, nor did I want, the drooling, mewing kind. I preferred something more restrained but deep-felt. Quality pity.

  Betty Rollin

  Crazy, Quality, Want

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• Generosity is the accompaniment of high birth; pity and gratitude are its attendants.

  Pierre Corneille

  Gratitude, Generosity, Birth

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• People sinking into self-pity and depression are dreary, but they can't get out of it by themselves. So every now and then, just sit there and listen, and listen, and listen. You're paying your membership dues in the human race.

  Barbara Walters

  Compassion, Race, Self

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• What a pity when editors review a woman's book, that they so often fall into the error of reviewing the woman instead.

  Fanny Fern

  Book, Fall, Errors

  Fanny Fern (2015). “Ginger-Snaps”, p.70, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Pity that gold should always bring with it the canker - covetousness.

  Fanny Fern

  Envy, Gold, Should

  FANNY FERN (1857). “FRESH LEAVES”, p.19

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• Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady, yet probably it does tend to dry one's feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind.

  Mary McCarthy

  Laughter, Self, Wind

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• Ah! some love Paris, / And some Purdue. / But love is an archer with a low I.Q. / A bold, bad bowman, and innocent of pity. / So I'm in love with / New York City.

  Phyllis McGinley

  New York, Archer, Love Is

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• Assuredly it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.

  Alice Meynell

  Art, Laughter, Would Be

  Alice Meynell (1925). “Essays”

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• An ounce of help is worth more than a pound of pity any day.

  Louise Jordan Miln

  Pounds, Helping

  Louise Jordan Miln (2007). “The Green Goddess”, p.33, Library of Alexandria

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• Age, per se, may claim tenderness and pity, but not respect; that only comes when the years have brought humanity and wisdom and the experience that worketh hope.

  Margaret Deland

  Years, Humanity, Age

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• It is a pity that, commonly, more care is had--yea, and that among very wise men--to find out rather a cunning man for their horse than a cunning man for their children.

  Roger Ascham

  Wise, Horse, Children

  Roger Ascham (1815). “The English Works of Roger Ascham: Preceptor to Queen Elizabeth”, p.206

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• In extreme danger fear feels no pity.
  [Lat., In summo periculo timor miericordiam non recipit.]

  Julius Caesar

  Fear, Danger, Feels

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• There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Play, Doe, Theater

  Mary Roberts Rinehart (1931). “My story”, Farrar & Rinehart

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• there is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Laughter, Book, Play

  Mary Roberts Rinehart (1931). “My story”, Farrar & Rinehart

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• O, if there be any kind of life most sad, and deepest in the scale of pity, it is the dry, cold impotence of one, who has honestly set to the work of his own self-redemption.

  Horace Bushnell

  Self, Redemption, Dry

  Horace Bushnell (1858). “Nature and the Supernatural: As Together Constituting the One System of God”, p.237

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• pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Dark, Roots, Charity

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Housekeeping: A Novel”, p.178, Macmillan

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• I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth.

  Florida Scott-Maxwell

  Love Is, Law, Joy

  Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.41, Knopf

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• too great pity is the greatest cruelty.

  St. Catherine of Siena

  Cruelty

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• Ah, there is nothing more beautiful than the difference between the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a holy being, and the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a self-righteous being. The one is all contempt; the other, all pity.

  Alexander MacLaren

  Beautiful, Self, Differences

  Alexander Maclaren (1859). “Sermons preached in Union chapel, Manchester”, p.34

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• Are we not to pity and supply the poor, though they have no relation to us? No relation? That cannot be. The Gospel styles them all our brethren.

  Thomas Sprat

  Style, Poor, Alms

  Thomas Sprat (1678). “A Sermon Preached at the Anniversary Meeting of the Sons of Clergy-men: In the Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, Nov. Vii, 1678”, p.11

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• There are some women in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else. Love is scarcely felt before duty rushes to encase it, anger impossible because one must always be calm and see both sides, pity evaporates in expedients, even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Grief, Love Is, Should Have

  Sylvia Townsend Warner (2011). “Selected Stories”, p.246, Hachette UK

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• Truth is the only good and the purest pity. ... Men lie for profit or for pity. All lies turn to poison, but a lie that is told for pity or shame breeds such a host of ills that no power on earth can compass their redemption.

  Storm Jameson

  Lying, Men, Earth

  Storm Jameson (1922). “The Clash”

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• Blessed is he who invented recording! But what a pity that he was not born centuries earlier! Think only of all that we would be able to hear and therefore understand better. Oh, the unending research in libraries and museums, the readings and collations of texts, the maddening desire to know the truth!

  Wanda Landowska

  Music, Blessed, Reading

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• In general, indulgence for those we know is rarer than pity for those we know not.

  Antoine Rivarol

  Clemency, Indulgence, Knows

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• Some people act as if there were a penalty for carrying concealed troubles. They exhibit them at every opportunity, begging for sympathy, even condescending to accept pity. Such persons never realize that the very ones to whom they are complaining are often struggling under a burden greater than their own.

  Alice Hegan Rice

  Struggle, Opportunity, People

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