Quotes About Pitifulness

As Thomas Szasz, M.D., points out in The Myth of Mental Illness, many people in our society develop neurotic symptoms or psychosomatic illnesses because the only way to become important in Christian culture is to be conspicuously more pitiful than others.

I believe in religion against the religious; in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer.

The Other should be a glorious, not a pitiful Other, an object of admiration not of commiseration, the object of a challenge, not that interactive, democratic Other which is not even really your equal. The Other exists more intensely in the dual relation, in rivalry and challenge, than in interaction, conviviality and cosy multiculturalism.

What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?