57 Pity Quotes For Reflection

In life's complex tapestry, moments of struggle and sorrow often lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Pity, a seemingly simple emotion, can evoke profound reflections on our experiences and interactions. To help you navigate these contemplative moments, we've compiled a selection of the top 57 pity quotes. Each quote is chosen not just for its profundity, but also for its ability to offer comfort, insight, and a fresh perspective. Whether you're seeking solace or simply wish to reflect, these quotes promise to inspire and uplift. Join us as we explore the multifaceted emotions that pity can unveil.

1. “Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.” - Dorothy Parker

2. “The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.” - Benjamin Franklin

3. “Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.” - richard wright

4. “A pity to survive night flights over St. Georges Channel only to crack my skull falling from a ladder.” - Eoin Colfer

5. “It's not a problem. There are people out there with much worse problems than mine."-Cynthia"Doesn't make yours any more fun to bear."-Liza"No. But it does help with the self-pity."- Cynthia” - Jennifer Crusie

6. “Satirize wickedness if you must--but pity weakness.” - L.M. Montgomery

7. “Yet I pity the poor wretch, though he's my enemy. He's yoked to an evil delusion, but the same fate could be mine. I see clearly: we who live are all phantoms, fleeing shadows.” - Sophocles

8. “I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.” - Martha Stout

9. “The raw hunk of meat that used to be my enemy makes a sound, and I know where the mouth is. And I think the word he's trying to say is 'please'. Pity, not vengeance sends my arrow flying into his skull.” - Suzanne Collins

10. “This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.” - Ayn Rand

11. “The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.” - H.G. Wells

12. “Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift; if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.” - Margaret Atwood

13. “You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” - Nelson Algren

14. “Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.” - William Blake

15. “Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.” - Terry Goodkind

16. “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. 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 by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro... two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” - W.E.B. DuBois

17. “I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had brought him there to be close to his death, I understood this also at the same moment. For who would wish to see a companion gasp his last on a jolting cart? We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full meed of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.” - Barry Unsworth

18. “And I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things.” - George R.R. Martin

19. “Don't pity this sinful world!Just pity those who made it so!” - Toba Beta

20. “Some arrogant feel very confident that they are the best.That's pity. Much better men let them feel so for a reason.” - Toba Beta

21. “English : Don't pity if you don't help!Indonesia: Usah kasihan jika tak bantu!” - Toba Beta

22. “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

23. “Some things take so longBut how do I explainWhen not too many peopleCan see we're all the sameAnd because of all their tearsYour eyes can't hope to seeThe beauty that surrounds themNow, isn't it a pity” - George Harrison

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

25. “I gave myself to you sooner than I ever did to any man, I swear to you; and do you know why? Because when you saw me spitting blood you took my hand; because you wept; because you are the only human being who has ever pitied me. I am going to say a mad thing to you: I once had a little dog who looked at me with a sad look when I coughed; that is the only creature I ever loved. When he died I cried more than when my mother died. It is true that for twelve years of her life she used to beat me. Well, I loved you all at once, as much as my dog. If men knew what they can have for a tear, they would be better loved and we should be less ruinous to them.” - Alexandre Dumas-fils

26. “You can’t buy time, Nick. Ever. It’s the only thing in life you can’t get most of, and it’s the one thing that will mercilessly tear you up when it’s gone. It takes no pity on no soul and no heart.” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

27. “This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” - Wilfred Owen

28. “People are always doing things for my sake and strangely enough, I'm the one who suffers for it.” - Robert Masello

29. “Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul; You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s! Insolent in your yet-unshaken virtue, you disdained the prayers of a Penitent; But God will show mercy, though you show none. And where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from it, not opposed seduction. But the day of Trial will arrive! Oh! then when you yield to impetuous passions! when you feel that Man is weak, and born to err; When shuddering you look back upon your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of your God, Oh! in that fearful moment think upon me! Think upon your Cruelty! Think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon!” - Matthew Gregory Lewis

30. “While pity shows a lack of respect for other human beings, compassion has its roots in a deep respect for others. Pity is an emotion; compassion is a connection. Compassion sees the other as equal. Compassion happens when we care for another person enough to make his or her problems our own.” - Matt Litton

31. “As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...” - John Updike

32. “Show pity I beg you...We have today been struck down by fortuneBut tomorrow it may be your own turn to die.” - Guiseppe Verdi

33. “This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.” - Alberto Moravia

34. “Do not scorn pity that is the gift of a gentle heart, Éowyn!” - J.R.R. Tolkien

35. “Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.” - Willa Cather

36. “Rule Number Two, Monsignor. Do not show pity.” - Gretchen McNeil

37. “Loneliness, dejection, the contempt or pity of people around you--these are unpleasant feelings. But they are precisely the things that produce genuine Dark Ones.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

38. “I don't go in for being sorry for people. For one thing it's insulting. One is only sorry for people if they are sorry for themselves. Self-pity is the biggest stumbling block in our world today.~Jessop” - Agatha Christie

39. “Vina e un vis, mila e singura realitate.” - Thomas Keneally

40. “People pitied only what they could easily slaughter.” - C.J. Hill

41. “He saw her right after the seventh-period bell rang. She seemed dressed for the sole purpose of blending in with the lockers, but she stood out, anyway. It didn’t matter that her wide blue eyes were narrowed or that her pretty mouth was twisted into a near snarl — she was blatantly beautiful. It was kind of sick the way Ed was preoccupied with beautiful girls these days.He felt a little sorry for her. (He was also preoccupied with finding ways of feeling sorry for people.) She was new and trying hard not to look it. She was confused and trying to look tough. It was endearing is what it was.” - Francine Pascal

42. “The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.” - James Joyce

43. “Non ignora mali, miseris succurrere disco.” - Virgil

44. “I shot up out of my chair. “Change of plans. Finish your drink so we can go.”Jay responded flatly, “Go where exactly?”“I’m not sure but we’ll know it when we see it.”He looked at his glass and back to me. “Why bother?”I looked him the eye, seeing pain there and forcing myself not to flinch from it. “Because pity parties suck” I started walking toward the exit and over my shoulder asked “You coming?”He downed the rest of his drink and followed me out the door.” - Amanda Kelly

45. “Pity. What a useless emotion when you don't act on it. Pity is supposed to trigger compassion.” - Lish McBride

46. “The moment you tell someone else is the moment you become a whiner and the world’s smallest violin starts to play. The truth is, we all have problems.” - J.A. Redmerski

47. “Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.” - Criss Jami

48. “She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.” - Dean Koontz

49. “Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul.” - Paul Hoffman

50. “Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.” - Paul Hoffman

51. “No weekends for the gods now. Warsflicker, earth licks its open sores,fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chanceassassinations, no advance.Only man thinning out his own kindsounds through the Sabbath noon, the blindswipe of the pruner and his knifebusy about the tree of life...Pity the planet, all joy gonefrom this sweet volcanic cone;peace to our children when they fallin small war on the heels of smallwar - until the end of timeto police th eearth, a ghostorbiting forever lostin our monotonous sublime.” - Robert Lowell

52. “In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?” - Oscar Wilde

53. “If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.” - Randy Alcorn

54. “Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.” - Shannon L. Alder

55. “I feel the deepest, heartfelt pity for any adult who has never been in love.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

56. “I wept in self-pity, and because I knew you could never go back. You chose your path, and that was it.” - Juliet Marillier

57. “Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved mores still have difficulty destroying, since everyday one sees in our theaters someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person, and who, were he in the tyrant's place, would intensify the torments of his enemy still more; [like the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy, for fear of being seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and yet who listened impassively to the cries of so many citizens who were killed everyday on his orders. Nature, in giving men tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts.] Mandeville has a clear awareness that, with all their mores, men would never have been anything but monsters, if nature had not given them pity to aid their reason; but he has not seen that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues that he wants to deny in men. In fact, what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general. Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object; for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that he be happy?” - Jean Jacques Rousseau