Quotes from Beware of Pity

“No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“Shaken to the depths of your soul, you know that day and night someone is waiting for you, thinking of you, longing and sighing for you - a woman, a stranger. She wants, she demands, she desires you with every fiber of her being, with her body, with her blood. She wants your hands, your hair, your lips, your night and your day, your emotions, your senses, and all your thought and dreams. She wants to share everything with you, to take everything from you, and to draw it in with her breath. Henceforth, day and night, whether you are awake or asleep, there is somewhere in the world a being who is feverish and wakeful and who waits for you, and you are the centre of her waking and her dreaming. It is in vain that you try not to think of her, of her who thinks always of you, in vain that you seek to escape, for you no longer dwell in yourself, but in her. Of a sudden a stranger bears your image within her as though she were a moving mirror - no, not a mirror, for that merely drinks in your image when you offer yourself willingly to it, whereas she, the woman, this stranger who loves you, she has absorbed you into her very blood.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“ولأول مرة في حياتي بدأت اتبين ان الضعف - لا الشر، ولا الوحشية - هو المسئول عن أسوأ الكوارث التي تقع في هذه الدنيا !”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people's lives a burden with her presence.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“I realized that there was no point in denying oneself a pleasure because it was denied another, in refusing to allow oneself to be happy because someone else was unhappy.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man, when, without the certainty of its being reciprocated, she offers her love, and he, the wooed, remains cold and on the defensive! An insoluble tangle this, always; for not to return a woman's love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman's advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings. In vain, then, all the tenderness with which he extricates himself, useless all his polite, evasive phrases, insulting all his offers of mere friendship, once she has revealed her weakness! His resistance inevitably becomes cruelty, and in rejecting a woman's love he takes a load of guild upon his conscience, guiltless though he may be. Abominable fetters that can never be cast off!”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“ لكني منذ تلك الساعة تبينت أنه ما من إثم يمكن ان يطويه النسيان .. ما دام ضمير صاحبه يذكره .! ”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“Once more my pity had been stronger than my will.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“But theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone’s destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“In medicine the use of the knife is often the kinder course.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“الحظ دائماً شريك متطوع لخدمة المغامر الجسور.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness ...; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“What a mercy, I thought, that the crippled, the maimed, those whom Fate has cheated, at least in sleep have no knowledge of the shapeliness or unshapeliness of their bodies,”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us...”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“It is only the immeasurable, the limitless that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“C'est seulement à partir de ce moment que je commençai à comprendre (ce que taisent la plupart du temps les écrivains) que les malades, les estropiés, les gens laids, fanés, flétris, les êtres physiquement inférieurs aiment au contraire avec plus de passion et de violence, que les gens heureux et bien portants ; ils aiment d'un amour fanatique, sombre, aucune passion sur terre n'est plus violente et avide que celle de ces désespérés, de ces bâtards de Dieu qui ne trouvent que dans l'amour d'autrui et pour autrui leur raison de vivre. Le fait que c'est précisément de l'abîme le plus profond de la détresse que s'élève le plus furieusement le cri panique du désir de vivre, ce terrible secret, jamais, dans mon inexpérience, je ne l'avais soupçonné. Et c'est seulement en cette minute qu'il avait pénétré en moi comme un fer brûlant.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“yet it may serve to show that courage is often nothing but inverted weakness.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“her first glance at me would be bound to hold the question: have you forgiven me? And perhaps that still more critical question: will you bear with my love, and can you return it? That first moment when she would gaze up with a blush, a look of controlled and yet uncontrollable impatience, might be at once the most hazardous and decisive.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“no one would have pity on the foolish slave of his own pity.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at the bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting for us in the next room.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“Es gibt eben zweierlei Mitleid. Das eine, das schwachmütige und sentimentale, das eigentlich nur Ungeduld des Herzens ist, sich möglichst schnell freizumachen von der peinlichen Ergriffenheit vor einem fremden Unglück, jenes Mitleid, das gar nicht Mit-leiden ist, sondern nur instinktive Abwehr des fremden Leidens von der eigenen Seele. Und das andere, das einzig zählt - das unsentimentale, aber schöpferische Mitleid, das weiß, was es will, und entschlossen ist, geduldig und mitduldend alles durchzustehen bis zum Letzten seiner Kraft und noch über dies Letzte hinaus.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“Immer sind die Instinkte wissender als unsere wachen Gedanken.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

“For the first time in my life I had received an assurance that I had been of use to someone on this earth, and my astonishment at the thought that I, a commonplace, unsophisticated young officer, should really have the power to make someone else so happy knew no bounds.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity

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