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Of all the well-meant emotions pity is the cruelest to share.
--
Part 3, “When the Sea Swallows” - Chapter 3 (p. 128)

 

Joan Slonczewski

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It is only at first that pity, like morphine, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. The first few injections do good, they soothe, they deaden the pain. But the devil of it is that the organism, the body, just like the soul, has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphine, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say 'no', and then one must not mind the other person's hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all. Yes, my dear Lieutenant, one has got to keep one's pity properly in check, or it does far more harm than any amount of indifference — we doctors know that, and so do judges and myrmidons of the law and pawn-brokers; if they were all to give way to their pity, this world of ours would stand still - a dangerous thing pity, a dangerous thing!

 

Stefan Zweig

 

Nonviolence in the civil rights struggle has meant not relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant noncooperation with customs and laws which are institutional aspects of a regime of discrimination and enslavement. It has meant direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all.
Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others. It has meant, as I said, that we are no longer afraid and cowed. But in some substantial degree it has meant that we do not want to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a part. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.

 

Martin Luther King

 

A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action ... with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

 

Aristotle

 

Inevitably, in the secret chemistry of the emotions the feeling of pity for a sick person is imperceptibly bound up with tenderness.

 

Stefan Zweig

 

Art should be independent of all claptrap — should stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.

 

James McNeill Whistler