Sayings about Pity

It is better to be the object of jealousy, than of pity. ~ Moroccan Proverbs

If you lose your wife and fifteen pennies — oh ! what a pity about the money. ~ French Proverb

When a blind man bears the standard, pity those who follow. ~ French Proverb

If the secret sorrows of everyone could be read on their forehead, how many who now cause envy would suddenly become the objects of pity? ~ Italian Proverbs

Where there is no fear, there is no pity. ~ Estonian Proverbs

A snake deserves no pity. ~ Yiddish Proverbs

The fly has no pity for the thin man. ~ Congolese Proverb

Go to friends for advice; to women for pity; to strangers for charity; to relatives for nothing. ~ Spanish Proverbs

Pity the stranger, even if he is rich. ~ Yemeni Proverbs

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky. ~ Ojibway Indian Proverb

Quotations about Pity

I’d rather have anybody’s hate than their pity. ~ S. E. Hinton

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us. ~ George Eliot

Pity is always twinged with disgust. ~ Daniel Quinn

Take out pity and the whole structure of our traditional morality crumbles to pieces. ~ Frank Thilly

Pity in its embrace strangles respect. ~ Abraham Miller

Self-pity is like a snake that gets in your brain and lays its eggs there. ~ Steve Chandler

Reform is born of need, not pity. ~ Rebecca Harding Davis

They tell us that “Pity is akin to Love;” if so, Pity must be a poor relation. ~ Arthur Helps

Even your pity is like a blast of wind and the words you speak would strip a tree of its blossoms. ~ Tulasidasa

Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The heart of pity is the mortal helping the mortal. ~ Carolt T. Olson

Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us. The most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool. ~ Andre Maurois

Pity is often an eloquent advocate. ~ Edward Counsel

Pity makes suffering contagious. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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. ~ Aesop

Pity is a thing often vowed, seldom felt; hatred is a thing often felt, seldom avowed. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Pity is a noose we can hang ourselves with if we’re not careful. ~ Jared Estes

To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

The deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman is pity. ~ Vicki Baum

Pity is treason. ~ Maximilien Robespierre

It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. ~ H. G. Wells

Pity those who nature abuses; never those who abuse nature. ~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A pity beyond all telling, is hid in the heart of love. ~ William Butler Yeats

The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption. ~ Dean Koontz

Pity is more spectator-like than compassion; we can pity people while maintaining a safe emotional distance from them. ~ Aaron Ben-Ze’ev

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

Pity is an attribute of men rather than of gods. ~ R.P. Winnington-Ingram

Pity is an emotion equally unpleasant to the bestower as to the recipient. ~ Boleslaw Prus

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. ~ Herman Melville

Pity is the feeling of well-intentioned people who are unable to act. ~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Pity is like a kind of illness that comes when it is too late and you can’t do anything about it. ~ Rober Lalonde

All pity is self-pity. ~ W. H. Auden

Pity is like a swamp. The longer we stand in the muck, the more we stink. ~ Nancy Hull-Mast

It is easy to pity when once one’s vanity has been tickled. ~ Willa Cather

Pity cost nothing and isn’t worth nothing. ~ Josh Billings

A man who is prevented from helping by his own pity is like a man who, when he saw another blind, put out his own eyes in sorrow, instead of leading the blind. ~ Jessie Ethel Sampter

Pity is like lust … both like to masquerade as love and it’s powerfully hard to know the difference when you’re in the throes of it. ~ Michelle Black

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

Self-pity is like a dog eating its own vomit or a pig rolling around in its own waste. ~ Keith Cameron Smith

He best can pity who has felt the woe. ~ John Gay

Pity is for living, envy is for dead. ~ Mark Twain

Pity those who don’t feel anything at all. ~ Sarah J. Maas

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

A woman’s pity often opens the door to love. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Every deed of mercy and every act of charity and every thought of pity is like the balm of Gilead to our souls. ~ Clarence Darrow

We pity in others only those evils which we have ourselves experienced. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Self-pity is like a clog in the pipe that stops the flow of life. It is the hand that takes rather than gives. ~ J. Nicole Williamson

Pity is based in self love; it is benevolence towards those in sorrow, and its root is in a likeness to ourselves. ~ Henry Lee Irwin

Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Pity makes the world soft to the weak and noble to the strong. ~ Edwin Arnold

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. ~ William Shakespeare

Pity is like a knife, sometimes, and it may pierce one who employs it more shrewdly than the victim it would save. ~ Edwin Arilington Robinson

Soft pity enters an iron gate. ~ William Shakespeare

Pity and love are nearly allied. ~ Edward Counsel

Those who do not complain are never pitied. ~ Jane Austen

Pity is like eating mustard without beef. ~ Augustus John Cuthbert Hare

God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease. ~ Albert Camus

Do not scorn pity that is the gift of a gentle heart. ~ J. R. R. Tolkien

Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What is pity but the vice of kindness. ~ Emil Cioran