Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

delusions in the dark are like hothouse flowers; they grow faster and with more tropical luxuriance. Confused and fantastic, they shoot up in the warm ground into bright creepers that choke your breath, forming with the speed of dreams and chasing the most absurd fears through the overheated brain.

I could not have been more elegantly forgiven.

Only when we know that we mean something to other people do we feel that there is point and purpose in our own existence.

Once you have gained some understanding of human nature, further understanding of it seems to grow mysteriously, and when you are able to feel genuine sympathy for a single form of earthly suffering, the magic of that lesson enables you to understand all others, however strange and apparently absurd they may be.