Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

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. That it is precisely from the lowest abysses of despair that the panic cries and groans of those hungry for love ring out most gruesomely—this was the dread secret which I, in my raw inexperience, had never ventured to suspect.