Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

if you try to repair a watch in too much of a hurry, you’re as likely as not to put the whole works out of order.

Why not break away from the treadmill for once?

What an interesting way to say you should get out of the routine and comfort of the daily life and grind.

Her eyes were like coffee beans, and, when she laughed, they really did seem to crackle like roasting beans.

Music; and perhaps one would waltz to it, let oneself soar, fly through the air, become more blissfully aware than ever of one’s lightness!

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

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.

all the time one was laughing and cracking silly jokes, somewhere in the world someone was lying at the point of death; that misery was lurking, people starving, behind a thousand windows; that there were such things as hospitals, quarries and coal mines; that in factories, in offices, in prisons countless thousands toiled and moiled at every hour of the day, and that it would not relieve the distress of a single human being if yet another were to torment himself needlessly.

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.

Just as a caged animal sometimes, for no apparent reason, will attack the keeper whom it usually fawns upon, so from time to time she was seized with a malicious desire to shatter at one blow the serenity of the atmosphere by suddenly referring to herself as ‘a wretched cripple.’

once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has been given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering, acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.

help anyone and everyone so far as you can.

Cease to be apathetic, indifferent!

There’s only one thing that disgusts me, one thing I can’t stand, and that is excuses, humbug, lies—I’m fed to the teeth with them. I’m not so stupid as you all think, and can stand quite a lot of frankness.

I don’t want you to feel you have to dole out your daily dose of pity—I don’t care two straws for you all and your precious pity—once and for all, I tell you, I can do without your pity.

I cannot stand these lies and your revolting indulgence any longer.’

one’s feelings are sometimes curiously childish—

it takes a good deal of courage to admit such naivete to oneself. For one’s emotional state is always determined by the most odd and accidental things, and it is precisely the most superficial factors that often fortify or diminish our courage.

In itself it would be marvellous, this house, this; lovely old property, marvellous…but to run it you need nerves of steel and an iron fist, or it’s never anything but a burden to you.”

Yes, that was the kind of person one ought to be, a person who’d rather be betrayed than betray—a decent, guileless person.

‘The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural.

And once more I was assailed by a feeling of pity, once more that confounded hot wave of emotion surged up within me, sapping my strength and my will.

I, foolish slave of my pity, had read into his words that a whole household was made gay, that an old man was made young again, that a sick girl believed herself to be hale and hearty? What could it have been?

Oh, if only I could stay here forever, be at no one’s beck and call, be free forever in the open fields, free as air!

why shouldn’t one be foolish once in a while?

pity is a confoundedly two-edged business. Anyone who doesn’t know how to deal with it should keep his hands, and, above all, his heart, off it.

one has got to keep one’s pity properly in check, or it does far more harm than any amount of indifference—

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!

truth is always a bitter pill to swallow, but we can’t let such an illusion go on flourishing like a weed.

Once you hold out even a straw of hope to one of those patients who are so cruelly called incurable he will immediately construct a plank out of it, and out of the plank a whole house.

He has become the beast of burden, the slave, of the old rascal: no matter if his knees give and his lips are parched with thirst, he is compelled, foolish victim of his own pity, to trot on and on, is fated to drag the wicked, infamous, cunning old man along forever on his back.

it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.

One must get well completely, or else one was not really well at all.

It was only from this moment that I began to have an inkling of the fact (suppressed by most writers) that the outcasts, the branded, the ugly, the withered, the deformed, the despised and rejected, desire with a more passionate, far more dangerous avidity than the happy; that they love with a fanatical, a baleful, a black love, and that no passion on earth rears its head so greedily, so desperately, as the forlorn and hopeless passion of these step-children of God, who feel that they can only justify their earthly existence by loving and being loved.

This guy seriously has a fear of love and commitment to be thinking these things about someone wanting him.

it is only from personal experience that the heart can learn the true nature of its emotions.

Our instincts are always more prescient than our waking thoughts;

Even the most wretched, the most pitiable creature has her pride,

anyone who made a single person happy had fulfilled the purpose of his existence,

it was really worth while to devote oneself to others to the very limit of one’s strength, and even beyond.

for a man who knows that he is bringing happiness with him has a new lightness in his tread.

Why should I not let myself be loved in all heedlessness, if it made others so happy?

there was no need for you to force yourselves or to hide your real feelings, you showed that you were fond of one another, you did not struggle against your tender feelings, you accepted the other’s love for you without shame and with sheer gratitude.

don’t torment yourself, I beg you…everything’s sure to be all right.’