Best 89 quotes in «self pity quotes» category

All at once the anger ran out of John Harkless; he was a hard man for anger to tarry with. And in place of it a strong sense of home-coming began to take possession of him. He was going home. “Back to Plattville, where I belong,” he had said; and he said it again without bitterness, for it was the truth. “Every man cometh to his own place in the end.” Yes, as one leaves a gay acquaintance of the playhouse lobby for some hard-handed, tried old friend, so he would wave the outer world God-speed and come back to the old ways of Carlow. What though the years were dusty, he had his friends and his memories and his old black brier pipe. He had a girl’s picture that he should carry in his heart till his last day; and if his life was sadder, it was infinitely richer for it. His winter fireside should be not so lonely for her sake; and losing her, he lost not everything, for he had the rare blessing of having known her. And what man could wish to be healed of such a hurt? Far better to have had it than to trot a smug pace unscathed. He had been a dullard; he had lain prostrate in the wretchedness of his loss. “A girl you could put in your hat — and there you have a strong man prone.” He had been a sluggard, weary of himself, unfit to fight, a failure in life and a failure in love. That was ended; he was tired of failing, and it was time to succeed for a while. To accept the worst that Fate can deal, and to wring courage from it instead of despair, that is success; and it was the success that he would have. He would take Fate by the neck. But had it done him unkindness? He looked out over the beautiful, “monotonous” landscape, and he answered heartily, “No!” There was ignorance in man, but no unkindness; were man utterly wise he were utterly kind.

Accept fate, and move on. Don't yield to the seductive pull of self-pity. Acting like a victim threatens your future.

Against Self-Pity It gets you nowhere but deeper into your own shit--pure misery a luxury one never learns to enjoy.

And in the sin of wanting always to be right, the punishment is knowing it isn't possible.

And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life.

And the world suddenly appeared to me as such an awfully large place, with I so totally alone in it that I could have cried from the bottom of my heart.

An expert in international relations, a reasonable woman with a rich deep voice, advised me that the world was not well. She considered two common states of mind: self-pity and aggression. Each one a poor choice for individuals. In combination, for groups or nations, a noxious brew that lately intoxicated the Russians in Ukraine, as it once had their friends, the Serbs in their part of the world. We were belittled, now we will prove ourselves. Now that the Russian state was the political arm of organised crime, another war in Europe no longer inconceivable. Dust down the tank divisions for Lithuania’s southern border, for the north German plain. The same potion inflames the barbaric fringes of Islam. The cup is drained, the same cry goes up: we’ve been humiliated, we’ll be avenged.

An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

Aunt Lavinia always had a near-religious belief that it was wicked to inflict one's personal despair on others. Any display of self-pity or self-dissatisfaction she saw as a social cruelty that was very nearly criminal.

Complaining is the front door to self-pity, which is a horribly unattractive quality, even for someone as beautiful as you.

-Çünkü biraz teşvik edildiğinde, suskunluğundan sıyrılıp, insanın ağzını bir karış açık bırakarak, ince bir derin bilgiyle donanmış, Latin ve Yunan klasiklerini yalayıp yutmuş, Roma mimarlığından, barom resimden, atonal müzikten ve yeni romandan söz etmeyi ustalıkla kıvırabilen biri olduğunu koyuyordu ortaya. O zaman, kendisi, büyük bir özenin ve berraklığın egemen olduğu gizli bir bahçede tek başına ve hayran hayran dolaşırken, sizde, olayların akışı ile paranın ve gücün egemenliğine boyun eğerek benzerlerinizle birlikte kaba ve iğrenç bir dünyaya ait olduğunuz gibisinden dayanılmaz bir duygu yaratıyordu.- O, Theobald ya da Kusursuz Cinayet

Don"t gaze too hard at your belly button Or you will unexpectedly hit rock bottom!

Even in that difficult hour when he knew death was imminent, he never indulged in self-pity. He knew intuitively that a person is only a victim if he accepts himself as one.

Everybody is so happy, and no one has a thought for you. And this is what happens to me everywhere and always. Everyone has marked out his own little spot on the Earth, his warm stove, his cup of coffee, his wife, his glass of wine in the evening, and is quite content with that;[...]I don't feel at ease anywhere. It is as if I always arrive a second too late, as if all the world had utterly failed to take me into account.

Feeling sorry for our bodies ought to be the closest we get to feeling sorry for ourselves.

Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.

How often have our own tears blinded us to the tears of others.

I choose to live by choice, not by chance; to make changes, not excuses; to be motivated, not manipulated; to be useful, not used; to excel, not to compete. I choose self-esteem, not self-pity. I choose to listen to my inner voice, not the random opinion of others. I choose to be me.

I didn't take well to pitying yourself. It weren't worth the effort or time and it pissed people off.

I don't find it funny, I just think self-pity's probably not the answer.' ‘It’s not self-pity, it’s the facts.’ ‘My life is effectively “over”?’ ‘I just mean. I don’t know. Just….’ He looked into the canal and gave a theatrical sigh. ‘When I was younger everything seemed possible. Now nothing does.

If you want to stay around here like death eating a soda cracker, that's your business.

I know that I'm not the only one who struggles with feelings of self-pity. How many thousands of others are sidelined by the debilitating effects of Lyme disease? Multitudes hover on sofas and beds like me, too drained to do anything more than just the bare necessities of daily functioning. In fact, some can't even do that. Anyone living with chronic illness that imposes severe limitations must experience similar feelings of disappointment, frustration, fear, sadness, and envy. I am not alone.

I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experincing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios. It became particularly dangerous for me to go near movies in which crippled girls were healed by the unselfish love of impoverished bellhops. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured.

Instead of complaining about your situation, actually do something about it. Playing "poor me" just ain't sexy.

In times of suffering, don't turn inward to self-pity or outward to revenge, but turn to the lover of your soul, Jesus.

It had been well if he had been left with only a wounded heart, but in that heart lay wounded pride. He hid it carefully, and the keener in consequence grew the sensitiveness, almost feminine, which no stranger could have suspected beneath the manner he wore. Under that bronzed countenance, with its firm-set mouth and powerful jaw--below that clear blue eye, and that upright easy carriage, lay a faithful heart haunted by a sense of wrong: he who is not perfect in forgiveness must be haunted thus; he only is free whose love for the human is so strong that he can pardon the individual sin; he alone can pray the prayer,"Forgive us our trespasses," out of a full heart. Forgiveness is the only cure of wrong. And hand in hand with Sense-of-injury walks ever the weak sister-demon Self-pity, so dear, so sweet to many--both of them the children of Philautos, not of Agape.

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.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

Most martyr stories – sacred and profane – contain an element of superiority. This self-denying hero or heroine is "rewarded," at the very least, by capturing the admiring focus of the narrative, while everyone else recedes into the background.

No one can please a man who is not at peace with himself.

Of all the crap we carry around self-pity is probably the easiest one to let go. You do not have the right to make your misery everyone else’s problem. You do not have license to go out into the world and be an asshole. You do not have the right to hurt others because you are hurting inside. Get over yourself.

Oh dear. I do believe this is self-pity. I am imagining myself dramatically dead, tragically taken from you and even more lamentably forgotten. What dreadful clichés war and social strife reduces us to, and how powerful the effect must be, if even I am so infected. I think I must pull myself together.

Only a teaspoon of self-pity, girl. Every day give yourself a teaspoonful, but only a teaspoonful. Fill it up full, but only once! Don’t let yourself have more. You can’t live off it. But just a bit of it is like a tonic.

Practically all the sadness we experience in life comes from our feeling sorry for ourselves.

Satan mounts his mutiny against God through a deceitful stronghold: God is untrustworthy. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, he places God's heart on trial by whispering insidious lies: "God is holding back on you. He wants you to jump through hoops in order to earn His love. He's stingy. He doesn't have your best interest in mind. You're better off trusting in yourself. Your resources and functional saviors work better then waiting and trusting in Him.

Self pity is a deep grieve.

Self pity is a hard drug.

Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.

She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.

Some people have compassion for even strangers, but not for their own bodies.

Stop bitching about everybody else and what they’ve done to you and start cleaning up your own shit yourself. The only person who can make you a victim is you.

The circles of shame are vicious. Painful feelings of shame help cause people to be depressed and suicidal, these in turn become shameful aspects of the self. Being angry does not necessarily cause more anger, being envious does not necessarily cause more envy (though once we envy, we can also envy someone's lack of envy), but, in our culture at least, shame (and envy and self-pity) are things to be ashamed about. The two common feelings of suicide are hopelessness and powerlessness; each is shameful, and this additional experience of shame adds pain on pain. A man who despairs because he feels his prospects of having a family are hopeless also feels he will never lose the feeling of shame over being wifeless and childless. To be powerless to change one's life in ways that others can is cause to feel ashamed of one's powerlessness.

... there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven't lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don't associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it's just that they are giving themselves a D- rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way.

There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn't say what I nearly said, because the good professor's phone pals were used to cheering or teasing him out of bouts of pessimism and insecurity when he would sometimes say ridiculous things like: 'I hope you don't mind being disturbed by some mere wog and upstart.' The remedy for this was not to indulge it but to reply with bracing and satirical stuff which would soon get the gurgling laugh back into his throat. But I'm glad I didn't say, 'What, Edward, splashing about again in the waters of self-pity?' because this time he was calling to tell me that he had contracted a rare strain of leukemia. Not at all untypically, he used the occasion to remind me that it was very important always to make and keep regular appointments with one’s physician.

There's no good in moping girl, there's work to be done... Have you forgotten, nobody likes a person who feels sorry for herself.

There's nothing more humiliating than feeling sorry for yourself while watching other people feel sorry for you too.

The world is full of widows--several among my closer friends. We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage--forty-one years, for me: alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad. Every decision now taken alone; no one to defuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience--everywhere, always--so get on with it and don't behave as though you are uniquely afflicted. I didn't tell myself that at the time, and I doubt if it would have helped if I had, but it is what I have come--not so much to feel as to understand.

True lament isn't an expression of weakness, whining or self-pity. It's an authentic expression of faith.

We began our life together at a moment of natural self-pity and defeat that left an inimitable impression on both of us. The rejection chastened me and let me know my proper place in the grand scheme of things. It was the last time I would ever make a move that required boldness or a leap of the imagination. I became tentative, suspicious, and dull. I learned to hold my tongue and mark my trail behind me and to look to the future with a wary eye. Finally, I was robbed of a certain optimism, that reckless acceptance of the world and all it could hand my way that had been my strength and deliverance.

You'll do well, if you don't mire in self-pity. Self-pity only gets you more of the same. Don't waste time on it.