Quotes and Sayings about Pity
"What pity is it That we can die, but once to serve our country."
- Joseph Addison
(Related: Country, Pity)
"Don't pity me now, don't pity me never; I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever."
- James Agate
(Related: Nothing, Now, Pity)
"Santa is our culture's only mythic figure truly believed in by a large percentage of the population. It's a fact that most of the true believers are under eight years old, and that's a pity."
- Chris Van Allsburg
(Related: Culture, Fact, Old, Pity, Population, Years)
"It's a pity that I can never really enjoy my movies because, after the mixing, your capacity as a spectator just disappears. I have to think about what I felt just before the mixing."
- Pedro Almodovar
(Related: Movies, Pity)
"Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable."
- Maya Angelou
(Related: Self)
"It wasn't until we got over the self pity that we were able to accept suffering as apart of our life with Christ. A man or woman reaches this plane only when he or she ceases to be the hero."
- Corazon Aquino
(Related: Life, Christ, Man, Pity, Self, Suffering, Woman)
"What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it."
- Margot Asquith
(Related: America, Columbus, Pity)
"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men."
- Francis of Assisi
(Related: Men, God, Compassion, Pity, Will)
"'Tis very great pity that they who are so apt to over-rate themselves in smaller matters, shou'd, where it most concerns them to know, and stand upon their Value, be so insensible of their own worth."
- Mary Astell
(Related: Pity, Value, Worth)
"A lot of it just has to do with luck, serendipity."
- Emanuel Ax
(Related: Luck)
"Pity is the deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman."
- Vicki Baum
(Related: Feeling, Pity, Woman)
"Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity."
- Stephen Vincent Benet
(Related: Honesty, Man, Self)
"Synergy and serendipity often play a big part in medical and scientific advances."
- Julie Bishop
(Related: Medical, Play)
"Where mercy, love, and pity dwell, there God is dwelling too."
- William Blake
(Related: God, Love, Mercy, Pity)
"I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls."
- Lionel Blue
(Related: Sympathy, End, Pity)
"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
- W. E. B. Du Bois
(Related: Soul, Contempt, Eyes, Pity, Self, Sense, World)
"Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Hope, Pity, Selfishness)
"Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive."
- F. H. Bradley
(Related: Men, Wife, Knowledge, Pity, Wives)
"The all-seeing eye of God beheld our deplorable state; infinite pity touched the heart of the Father of mercies; and infinite wisdom laid the plan of our recovery."
- David Brainerd
(Related: Wisdom, Father, God, Heart, Eye, Infinite, Pity, State)
"It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to."
- Anita Brookner
(Related: Home, Women, Pity, Will)
"Anger and hate against one we love steels our hearts, but contempt or pity leaves us silent and ashamed."
- Edgar Rice Burroghs
(Related: Anger, Love, Contempt, Hate, Pity)
"I had one of the best days of my life. I spent the afternoon with my two kids and my ex-wife at Serendipity. Then I came to the theater, and you know, I think I did the play the best I've ever done it."
- Gabriel Byrne
(Related: Life, Kids, Play, Theater)
"If a man is tongue-tied, don't laugh at him, but, rather, feel pity for him, as you would for a man with broken legs."
- Abraham Cahan
(Related: Man, Pity, Tongue)
"When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive."
- Miguel de Cervantes
(Related: Law, Motive, Pity)
"The sea has neither meaning nor pity."
- Anton Chekhov
(Related: Meaning, Pity, Sea)
"If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you."
- Lord Chesterfield
(Related: Love, People, Fear, Ambition, Pity, Pride, Reason)
"Politics is so much about serendipity that we've got to have a bigger pool of women, so that when people drop out of the process, you've got others to turn to."
- Eleanor Clift
(Related: Politics, Women, People)
"There is a fine line between serendipity and stalking."
- David Coleman
"There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion."
- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
(Related: Disillusionment, Girls, Moments, Pity, Waste, Will)
"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
(Related: Pity, Worth, Writer)
"You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly."
- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
(Related: Old, Pity)
"Beloved, till life can charm no more; And mourned, till Pity's self be dead."
- William Collins
(Related: Life, Charm, Pity, Self)
"Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling."
- Charles Horton Cooley
(Related: Country, Dependence, Feeling, Pity)
"Cruelty is softened by fear, not pity."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Fear, Cruelty, Pity)
"Oh, how sweet it is to pity the fate of an enemy who can no longer threaten us!"
- Pierre Corneille
(Related: Enemy, Fate, Pity)
"Pity speaks to grief More sweetly than a band of instruments."
- Barry Cornwall
(Related: Grief, Pity)
"The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent."
- Edward Dahlberg
(Related: Men, Love, Fear, Virtue, Effect, Machine, Machines, Pity)
"Reform is born of need, not pity."
- Rebecca H. Davis
(Related: Pity, Reform)
"It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers."
- Chauncey Depew
(Related: Fathers, Pity)
"That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity's small change in general society."
- Charles Dickens
(Related: Change, Society, Pity)
"Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely."
- Theodore Dreiser
(Related: Pity, Universe)
"I tell people to monitor their self-pity. Self-pity is very unattractive."
- Patty Duke
(Related: People, Self)
"If it weren't the problem of politics for me, it would be another. And yet, sometimes it's so difficult. And I feel sorry for myself. And then hate myself for this feeling of self-pity."
- Julie Nixon Eisenhower
(Related: Politics, Feeling, Hate, Self)
"Consequences are unpitying."
- George Eliot
(Related: Consequences)
"More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us."
- George Eliot
(Related: Wisdom, Pity, Will)
"There's a shortage of perfects breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours."
- Cary Elwes
(Related: Pity, World)
"Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion."
- Oriana Fallaci
(Related: Mother, Abortion, Pity)
"People have always found me challenging - I don't know why, when I am only being myself. I don't understand why they find me so annoying but they do. It is pity, but that is how it is."
- Ian Hamilton Finlay
(Related: People, Being, Pity)
"Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."
- Gustave Flaubert
(Related: Time, Dance, Language, Pity, Stars)
"Suffering! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues."
- Anatole France
(Related: Life, Courage, Pity, Value)
"When I go out there, I have no pity on my brother. I'm out there to win."
- Joe Frazier
(Related: Brother, Pity)
"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
(Related: Life, Power, Living, Man, Pity, Wishing)
"I understand how hard it is to talk to people about MS. You don't want pity or random advice."
- Teri Garr
(Related: People, Advice, Pity, Talk, Want)
"Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon."
- Andre Gide
(Related: Beauty, Love, Old, Pity, Prayer)
"I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas."
- Jean-Luc Godard
(Related: Money, Ideas, American, Cinema, Pity)
"Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other."
- Oliver Goldsmith
(Related: Friendship, Pity)
"It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos."
- Manly Hall
(Related: Boredom, Chaos, Disillusionment, Self)
"I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process."
- Benjamin Harrison
(Related: Man, Pity, Will, Woman)
"A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection."
- Arthur Helps
(Related: Admiration, Affection, Pity)
"Politics is a lot of serendipity. You're in the right place and the right time and you've got the right message, and it either connects for you or, or it doesn't."
- Jon Huntsman, Jr.
(Related: Politics, Time, Right)
"The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Complaint, Contempt, Fortune, Pity)
"There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish."
- John Keats
(Related: Nature, Fire, Heroism, Human nature, Pity, Wonder)
"Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world."
- Helen Keller
(Related: Enemy, Self, World, Yield)
"Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Related: Sympathy, Soul, Concern, Giving, May, Pity)
"The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory."
- Jonathan Kozol
(Related: Victory, Pity, Struggle, Taste)
"You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot."
- Stanley Kubrick
(Related: Pity)
"It's a mistake to confuse pity with love."
- Stanley Kubrick
(Related: Love, Mistake, Pity)
"We need to suffer, that we may learn to pity."
- Letitia Landon
(Related: May, Pity)
"Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world; dwell in love, and then you dwell in God."
- William Law
(Related: Love, God, Soul, Pity, World)
"The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just."
- David Herbert Lawrence
(Related: Anger, Soul, Intuition, Justice, Pity)
"Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!"
- Jerry Lewis
(Related: Pity, Want)
"It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality."
- James Loeb
(Related: Quality, People, Knowledge, Wealth, Literature, Pity, Variety)
"Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness."
- Amy Lowell
(Related: Loneliness, Pity)
"To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike."
- Horace Mann
(Related: Pity)
"Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
- Don Marquis
(Related: Earth, Pity)
"Only those who spread treachery, fire, and death out of hatred for the prosperity of others are undeserving of pity."
- Jose Marti
(Related: Death, Fire, Hatred, Pity, Prosperity, Treachery)
"It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up."
- W. Somerset Maugham
(Related: Thought, Day, Pity)
"Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us. The most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool."
- Andre Maurois
(Related: Happiness, Compassion, Fool, Self)
"Oh may He look on us with love and pity and then we shall be able to do anything He wishes us to do, no matter how difficult to accomplish or painful to our feeling."
- Catherine McAuley
(Related: Love, Feeling, May, Pity, Wishes)
"In reality, serendipity accounts for one percent of the blessings we receive in life, work and love. The other 99 percent is due to our efforts."
- Peter McWilliams
(Related: Work, Life, Love, Blessings, Reality)
"What a pity human beings can't exchange problems. Everyone knows exactly how to solve the other fellow's."
- Olin Miller
(Related: Pity, Problems)
"I think it's a pity that in many people's minds constitutional reform and PR have come to mean much the same thing."
- Ferdinand Mount
(Related: People, Pity, Reform)
"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Dreams, Genius, African, Pity, Snow)
"It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance."
- Barney Oliver
(Related: Society, Travel, Chance, Pity)
"I just had to plod along without having any teaching, which was a pity."
- Ida Rentoul Outhwaite
(Related: Pity, Teaching)
"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
- Wilfred Owen
(Related: Poetry, War, Pity)
"The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught."
- Anne Rice
(Related: Character, Beginning, End, Pity, Principles)
"It is a pity that my collection of trophies contains not a single Russian."
- Manfred von Richthofen
(Related: Pity)
"Pity is treason."
- Maximilien Robespierre
(Related: Pity, Treason)
"She knows as well as anyone that pity, having played, soon tires."
- Edwin A. Robinson
(Related: Pity)
"I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being."
- Theodore Roosevelt
(Related: Work, Being, End, Hard work, Man, May, Pity, Worth)
"We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
(Related: Pity)
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Love, Knowledge, Longing, Mankind, Pity, Suffering)
"Sensual excess drives out pity in man."
- Marquis de Sade
(Related: Excess, Man, Pity)
"All who consult on doubtful matters, should be void of hatred, friendship, anger, and pity."
- Sallust
(Related: Anger, Friendship, Hatred, Pity)
"All those who offer an opinion on any doubtful point should first clear their minds of every sentiment of dislike, friendship, anger or pity."
- Sallust
(Related: Anger, Friendship, First, Opinion, Pity, Sentiment)
"Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
(Related: Character, Company, Man, Nobility, Pleasure)
"We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker of course and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. For God's sake, look after our people."
- Robert Falcon Scott
(Related: God, People, End, Pity)
"Pity those who nature abuses; never those who abuse nature."
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
(Related: Nature, Abuse, Pity)
"What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!"
- Sydney Smith
(Related: England, Pity, Vice)
"I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control."
- Muriel Spark
(Related: Mother, Thought, Control, Birth control, Pity)
"The fool within himself is the object of pity, until he is flattered."
- Richard Steele
(Related: Fool, Pity)
"To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face."
- Stendhal
(Related: Time, First, Man, Pity, Respect, Sight)
"It is a great pity but tis certain from every day's observation of man, that he may be set on fire like a candle, at either end provided there is a sufficient wick standing out."
- Laurence Sterne
(Related: Day, End, Fire, Man, May, Observation, Pity)
"The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity."
- Clifford Stoll
(Related: Internet)
"I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago."
- John Templeton
(Related: Science, People, Now, Pity, Will)
"I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses."
- William Makepeace Thackeray
(Related: Man, Pity, Senses)
"As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity."
- Ernst Toller
(Related: Day, Heroes, Kings, Now, Pity)
"Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?"
- Ivan Turgenev
(Related: Feelings, Strength, Pity, Remorse)
"Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah... didn't miss the boat."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Pity, Race)
"Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Party, Pity)
"To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most."
- Miguel de Unamuno
(Related: Love, Pity, Spirit)
"Ice-cream is exquisite - what a pity it isn't illegal."
- Voltaire
(Related: Pity)
"There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath."
- Woodrow Wilson
(Related: History, Pity, Tears, World, Wrath)
"A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love."
- William Butler Yeats
(Related: Love, Heart, Pity)