Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

We both had some difficulty in suppressing a faint smile, that significant smile that passes between two people who, in a fairly large group of people, share a closely guarded secret.

During the war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one’s fellows.

But just as flowers grow in more tropical luxuriance in a hothouse, so do wild and frenzied ideas flourish in the darkness.

And when daylight comes in at the window you think more clearly than when you are muffled up in the malignant darkness that delights in creating spectres.

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.

But you, all of you, you always think you’ve got to spare my feelings with your false sense of delicacy, and you fancy you’re being kind to me with your beastly consideration

The gravel gleamed like freshly fallen snow between the double row of trees which, with their dark shadows, flanked the path; gleaming now like glass in the light, now like mahogany in the darkness, they stood there in ghostly rigidity.

Things half done and hints half given are always bad; all the evil in the world comes from half-measures.

For when one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.

Believe me, as an older man, I know there is no need to be ashamed of being taken in by life now and again; it is, if anything, a blessing not yet to have acquired that over-keen, diagnostic, misanthropic eye, and to be able to look at people and things trustfully when one first sees them.

I maintain that it is precisely the incurable one should try to cure, and, what is more, that it is only in so-called incurable cases that a doctor shows his mettle.

I am sorry, but medicine has nothing to do with morals; every illness is in itself an anarchistic phenomenon, a revolt against Nature, and one must therefore employ every means to fight it, every means.

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.

But 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 against the sufferings of another; 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.

In medicine the use of the knife is often the kinder course.

It requires an incalculable amount of energy to restore the faith of a person whom one has once betrayed.

For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.

Those whom Fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.’

For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.