Pitied? Horrid thought. The great thing in life was to be so situated that you can pity others. But to be pitied yourself?

The moral sense is at the root of pity. Pity means compassion — the capacity to resent someone else's suffering as if it were one's own. The absence of pity is a mark of obtuseness: incapacity of identifying oneself with those who are in pain or downtrodden. Worthy of pity are mainly mistreated or bereaved children, the old, the sick, all those that are helpless and abused. This includes the majority of animals. And we mustn't ask ourselves whether or not they are able to go to heaven, whether or not they are able to reason, or to speak, or to count, or to vote, but we must ask ourselves only one question: "Are they able to suffer?" And it is their misfortune that they are only too able to suffer.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

When one rises above the individual villainy displayed, one can only pity them all, just as we shall be pitied some day.

Mourn the dead by pitying the living.

Praise those with virtue; pity those without it.

Pity is an emotion equally unpleasant to the bestower as to the recipient.

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.

Even while we hate, we still have that deep unusual compassion for our rivals, and they hate it when they realize that we are feeling sorry for them.

If you must be affected by other people's misfortunes, show them pity instead of contempt. Drop this readiness to hate and take offence.

Pity preserves things that are ripe for decline, it defends things that have been disowned and condemned by life, and it gives a depressive and questionable character to life itself by keeping alive an abundance of failures of every type. People have dared to call pity a virtue… people have gone even further, making it into the virtue, the foundation and source of all virtues, - but of course you always have to keep in mind that this was the perspective of a nihilistic philosophy that inscribed the negation of life on its shield. Schopenhauer was right here: pity negates life, it makes life worthy of negation, - pity is the practice of nihilism. Once more: this depressive and contagious instinct runs counter to the instincts that preserve and enhance the value of life: by multiplying misery just as much as by conserving everything miserable, pity is one of the main tools used to increase decadence - pity wins people over to nothingness! … You do not say ‘nothingness’ : instead you say ‘the beyond’; or ‘God’; or ‘the true life’; or nirvana, salvation, blessedness … This innocent rhetoric from the realm of religious-moral idiosyncrasy suddenly appears much less innocent when you see precisely which tendencies are wrapped up inside these sublime words: tendencies hostile to life.

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

It's better to arouse pity than envy.

Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.