No Self Pity Quotes

1. "I shot up out of my chair. "Change of plans. Finish your drink so we can go."Jay responded flatly, "Go where exactly?""I'm not sure but we'll know it when we see it."He looked at his glass and back to me. "Why bother?"I looked him the eye, seeing pain there and forcing myself not to flinch from it. "Because pity parties suck" I started walking toward the exit and over my shoulder asked "You coming?"He downed the rest of his drink and followed me out the door."
Author: Amanda Kelly

2. "The sea was cruel and selfish as human beings, and in its monstrous simplicity had no notion of complexities like pity, wounding, or remorse... You could see yourself in it... while the wind, the light, the swaying, the sound of the water on the hull worked the miracle of distancing, calming you until you didn't hurt anymore, erasing any pity, any wound, and any remorse."
Author: Arturo Pérez Reverte

3. "As she sat alone in the apartment, the enormity of it all started to sink in. Any hope that the North Korean regime might change with the death of Kim Il-sung was quickly dashed. The power had passed to his son. Things weren't going to get any better. She heard her father's words replaying in her ears. "The son is even worse than the father." "Now we're really fucked," she said to herself. Only then did tears of self-pity fill her eyes."
Author: Barbara Demick

4. "When the mind, for want of being sufficiently reduced by recollection at our first engaging in devotion, has contracted certain bad habits of wandering and dissipation, they are difficult to overcome, and commonly draw us, even against our wills, to the things of the earth.I believe one remedy for this is to confess our faults, and to humble ourselves before God. I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer: many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before God, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate. Let it be your business to keep your mind in the presence of the Lord. If it sometimes wander and withdraw itself from Him, do not much disquiet yourself for that: trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it: the will must bring it back in tranquility. If you persevere in this manner, God will have pity on you."
Author: Brother Lawrence

5. "Through the ages, many different groups have called themselves victims. Some came through wars and massacres. Some were slaves or minorities. But the Jews, who have always been victimized throughout history, don't see themselves as victims. We see ourselves as survivors. The difference between survivors and victims is that survivors go on with their lives after a tragedy, whereas victims continue to wallow in self-pity."
Author: Celso Cukierkorn

6. "Self pity was a drug. I must not become addicted. Self pity is like chocolate, as you get older, you can only afford a little bit."
Author: Charlaine Harris

7. "I wasn't lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could ?nd no meaning."
Author: Charles Bukowski

8. "I was young I was so young it hurt like a knifeinsidebecause there was no alternative except to hide as longas possible---not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:trying to connect."
Author: Charles Bukowski

9. "Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it; but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for those who have endured them. But that is not your pity, Jane; it is not the feeling of which your whole face is full at this moment—with which your eyes are now almost overflowing—with which your heart is heaving—with which your hand is trembling in mine. Your pity, my darling, is the suffering mother of love: its anguish is the very natal pang of the divine passion. I accept it, Jane; let the daughter have free advent—my arms wait to receive her."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

10. "Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out."
Author: Cheryl Strayed

11. "It's my opinion, with some people, just knowing they are alone, living inside of their own miserable, self hating, dysfunctional mind, with their own immature, insecure, self pitying self is its own revenge. Their existence is their karma."
Author: Colleen Truscott Fry

12. "Sorry.Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people's pain as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us trodden and sodden as one another. Sorry is a lot of things. It's a hole refilled. A debt repaid. Sorry is the wake of misdeed. It's the crippling ripple of consequence. Sorry is sadness, just as knowing is sadness. Sorry is sometimes self-pity. But Sorry, really, is not about you. It's theirs to take or leave.Sorry means you leave yourself open, to embrace or to ridicule or to revenge. Sorry is a question that begs forgiveness, because the metronome of a good heart won't settle until things are set right and true. Sorry doesn't take things back, but it pushes things forward. It bridges the gap. Sorry is a sacrament. It's an offering. A gift."
Author: Craig Silvey

13. "In this primal sense, then, evil is evil because it is rebellion against God. Evil is the failure to do what God demands or the performance of what God forbids. Not to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength is a great evil, for God has demanded it; not to love our neighbor as ourself is a great evil, for the same reason. To covet someone's house or car or wife is a great evil, for God has forbidden covetousness; to nurture bitterness and self-pity is evil, for a similar reason. The dimensions of evil are thus established by the dimensions of God; the ugliness of evil is established by the beauty of God; the filth of evil is established by the purity of God; the selfishness of evil is established by the love of God."
Author: D.A. Carson

14. "We got back to my house to find it ransacked. It was difficult to tell because I'm not the world's greatest housekeeper myself, but by the time I was in the kitchen I knew they had been here: I don't normally keep the oven open. I whipped out the gun and prowled around the house, finding it empty. Amy asked what they were looking for. I dodged the question by pointing out what a pity it was they tossed the place because it was immaculate before they got here and that it was too bad she didn't get to see it when it was clean. I went to the kitchen and ran water over my bleeding knuckles. "Look," Amy said, from behind me. "They threw laundry all over your floor in there." "Yeah. And they wore the clothes first, the bastards."
Author: David Wong

15. "For those who dispair that their lives are without meaning and without purpose, for those who dwell in a lonelines so terrible that it has withered their hearts, for those who hate because they have no recognition of the destiny they share with all humanity, for those who would squander their lives in self-pity and in self-destruction because they have lost the saving wisdom with which they are born, for all these and many more, hope waits in the dreams of a dog, where the scared bature of life may be clearly experienced without all but binding filter of human need, desire, greed, envy and endless fear. And here, in dream woods and fields, along with the shores of dream seas, with the profound awareness of the playful presence abiding in all things, Curtis is able to prove what she thus far only dared to hope is true: that although her mother never loved her, there is one who always has."
Author: Dean Koontz

16. "But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity."
Author: Dean Koontz

17. "Get away from my ex-girlfriend, you moany little whinge-bag.' Caelen took a deep breath, like he was in pain, and stood up. His voice was low, guttural. 'I was hoping I'd get the chance to kill you.' 'You won't be killing anyone, you sad little emo git.''You've stood in the way of our love for long enough.''Just listening to you makes me want to top myself, you self-pitying Paranormal Romance novel reject.'Caelen glared. 'Stop insulting me.''Why? If you cry will your mascara run?"
Author: Derek Landy

18. "When she paused, I embraced the opportunity to turn the trend of conversation by saying:'I am afraid that I was a little rude to you last night,' but I hardly expected such a blunt reply as she made.'Yes, you were exceedingly rude, and I hate rude men.''I hope you don't hate me,' I cried, laughingly.'Oh no, not quite. You're a Londoner, you see.'This was very severe. I confess I was hardly prepared for it, and I was tempted to say something cutting in reply, but checked myself, bowed, and merely remarked:'Which is not my fault. Therefore pity me rather than blame me.''Certainly I do that,' she replied, with an amusing seriousness.("The Doomed Man")"
Author: Dick Donovan

19. "The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti."
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

20. "He was addicted to meand now he has gone cold turkey. He used to send me fifty texts a day. And now he is ignoring me. It's like I was once his Barack Obama. And now I am John McCain, conceding defeat like a sad-face sock puppet, knowing I have sold the best of myself. He, my electorate, not only does not want me, he actively feels pity."
Author: Emma Forrest

21. "It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still will. Whether your name is Mozart, or Django Reinhardt, or Robert Johnson, or Jimi Hendrix, or whoever is next; who you are doesn't matter so long as you can open that conduit and let the music come through. It is the burning edge, whatever it sounds like and whoever is playing it. It is the noisy, messy, silly, invincible voice of life that comes through the LP on the turn-table, the transistor radio, or the Bose in your new Lexus that makes you want to get up out of whatever you are stuck in and dance. It is Dionysus and the Maenads all over again. No one can control it and I pity whoever tries. I am old now and only a house cat sunning herself in the window - but I was a tigress once, and I remember. I still remember."
Author: G.J. Paterson

22. "You must miss your father terribly, I know. Lord Eddard was a brave man, honest and loyal...but quite a hopeless player.' He brought the seed to his mouth with the knife. 'In King's Landing, there are two sorts of people The players and the pieces.' 'And I was a piece?' She dreaded the answer. 'Yes, but don't let that trouble you. You're still half a child. Every man's a piece to start with, and every maid as well. Even some who think they are players.' He at another seed. 'Cersei, for one. She thinks herself sly, but in truth she is utterly predictable. her strength rests on her beauty, birth, and riches. Only the first of those is truly her own, and it will soon desert her. I pity her then. She wants power, but has no notion what to do with it when she gets it. Everyone wants something, Alayne. And when you know what a man wants you know who he is, and how to move him."
Author: George R.R. Martin

23. "And seeing all the Hellespont covered over with the ships and all the shores and the plains of Abydos full of men, then Xerxes pronounced himself a happy man, and after that he fell to weeping. Artabanus, his uncle, therefore perceiving him the same who at first boldly declared his opinion advising Xerxes not to march against Hellas-this man, I say, having observed that Xerxes wept, asked as follows: 'O king, how far different from one another are the things which thou hast done now and a short while before now! for having pronounced thyself a happy man, thou art now shedding tears.' He said : 'Yea, for after I had reckoned up, it came into my mind to feel pity at the thought how brief was the whole life of man, seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive when a hundred years have gone by."
Author: H.G. Wells

24. "You're nothing like your sister," he tells me. "She meant a lot to me, okay? It's true. But the things I like about you have nothing to do with her. You - you are so strong and stubborn it drives me crazy. You're the one going through all this and you still put Laney first every time, instead of throwing yourself the pity party we both know you deserve. You call me out on my shit, and I like that, because sometimes I need someone to call me out on my shit. And you get Johnny Cash, and you take these incredible photos, and everything about you makes me hurt, in a good way, and it blows my mind that someone can be so amazing and not even see it."
Author: Hannah Harrington

25. "I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being."
Author: Henry Miller

26. "So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. they err who would assert that invariable this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. An when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bides the soul be rid of it."
Author: Herman Melville

27. "But I have so little of any of these things! You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?""No!" cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. "With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly." His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. "Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

28. "Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges."
Author: James Baldwin

29. "She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them."
Author: James Ellroy

30. "You can kill the spell of identification just as easily as youcan create it—if you lose the readers' sympathy for the character.You can lose reader sympathy by having your character commitacts of cruelty to another character with whom the readers identifymore strongly or for whom they have strong sympathy. Youcan lose reader sympathy by having the character make dumbchoices—acting at less than maximum capacity. The idiot inthe horror story who responds to creepy noises by going intothe attic armed only with a candle is an example. You can losereader sympathy when a character seems too ordinary, is stereotyped,or doesn't struggle hard enough. The reader wants tocheer a fighter, not witness a milquetoast wallowing in, say, selfpity."
Author: James N. Frey

31. "Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first."
Author: Jim Thompson

32. "We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence."
Author: Joan Didion

33. "If someone decides they're not going to be happy, it's not your problem. You don't have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing into their self-pity."
Author: Joyce Meyer

34. "We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written."
Author: Julio Cortázar

35. "Year by year, his life wasn't amounting to anything at all...And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity -- oh, the tediousness of it...Shouldn't he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all."
Author: Kiran Desai

36. "A woman with a sense of humor is never vain. (...) A woman who has a sense of humor possesses no refuge from the merciless truth about herself. She cannot think herself misunderstood. She cannot revel in self-pity. She cannot comfortably damn any one who differs from her."
Author: L.M. Montgomery

37. "There's great sadness and life doesn't work out like you would want, on a lot of levels, but there's no need to feel all alone. This happens to everybody, so there's no self-pity. This is the ride that humans are on, and all of it is essential for our natural part of it."
Author: Mike Mills

38. "We laughed. Ha, ha, we went. Ha, ha, ha. I'm not laughing now. Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and dread and doubt."
Author: Nick Hornby

39. "Love We Must PartLove, we must part now: do not let it beCalamitous and bitter. In the pastThere has been too much moonlight and self-pity:Let us have done with it: for now at lastNever has sun more boldly paced the sky,Never were hearts more eager to be free,To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and INo longer hold them; we are husks, that seeThe grain going forward to a different use.There is regret. Always, there is regret.But it is better that our lives unloose,As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,Break from an estuary with their courses set,And waving part, and waving drop from sight."
Author: Philip Larkin

40. "Was that pity? I think it was. No wonder, I even pity myself. Will the pity make her love me? Make her take me home with her and look after me like the plant? Fucking bastard smug plant."
Author: Rhona Cameron

41. "Try not to sing too many sad songs for yourself. The universe already hates you. Self-pity isn't going to help."
Author: Richard Kadrey

42. "When, Strike wondered, would he next enjoy a pint on a Friday with friends? The notion seemed to belong to a different universe, a life left behind. The strange limbo in which he was living, with Robin his only real human contact, could not last, but he was still not ready to resume a proper social life. He had lost the army, and Charlotte and half a leg; he felt a need to become thoroughly accustomed to the man he had become, before he felt ready to expose himself to other people's surprise and pity."
Author: Robert Galbraith

43. "Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girlsMarried impossible men?Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.Repeat 'impossible men': not merely rustic,Foul-tempered or depraved(Dramatic foils chosen to show the worldHow well women behave, and always have behaved).Impossible men: idle, illiterate,Self-pitying, dirty, sly,For whose appearance even in City parksExcuses must be made to casual passers-by.Has God's supply of tolerable husbandsFallen, in fact, so low?Or do I always over-value womanAt the expense of man?Do I?It might be so."
Author: Robert Graves

44. "To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, "so that he would see whether I knew myself or not." The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled 'Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.' He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. "I read his remarks again and again, many times [Catherine later recalled in her memoirs]. I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: 'What a pity that you will marry! I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me."
Author: Robert K. Massie

45. "That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it."
Author: Robin Hobb

46. "The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made pf chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again. [p. 59]"
Author: Siri Hustvedt

47. "I don't want you forgetting how different our circumstaces are. If you die, and I live, there's no life for me at all back in District Twelve. You're my whole life." Peeta says. "I would never be happy again. It's different for you. I'm not saying it wouldn't be hard. But there are other people who'd make your life worth living.""No one really needs me," he says, and there's no selfpity in his voice. It's true his family doesn't need him. They will mourn him, as will a handfull of friends. But they will get on.... I realise only one person will be damaged beyond repair if Peeta dies. Me."I do," I say. "I need you."
Author: Suzanne Collins

48. "It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called-- were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies. You may ridicule me--I am quite willing that you should-- I am a fit subject, no doubt. But I think if you knew what I have gone through these last few years you would rather pity me. And if they knew"--he nodded towards the college at which the dons were severally arriving--"it is just possible they would do the same."
Author: Thomas Hardy

49. "What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.Richard loves Richard; that is, I and I.Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why:Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any goodThat I myself have done unto myself?O, no! Alas, I rather hate myselfFor hateful deeds committed by myself.I am a villain. Yet I lie. I am not.Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter:My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,And every tongue brings in a several tale,And every tale condemns me for a villain.Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;All several sins, all used in each degree,Throng to the bar, crying all, "Guilty! guilty!"I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,And if I die no soul will pity me.And wherefore should they, since that I myselfFind in myself no pity to myself?"
Author: William Shakespeare

50. "Etymologically, "compassion" means to suffer together. "Together," however, is different from "identically." Compassion is not the same as selflessness, and not really the opposite of selfishness. Rather, it provides a basis for helping other people that is materially disinterested but emotionally self-regarding. As Rousseau wrote in Emile, "When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself..." Or, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has said, "Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs."
Author: William Voegeli

No Self Pity Quotes Pictures