Antoine Rivarol Quotes

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?

A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection.

A woman's pity often opens the door to love.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.

I think I love most people best when they are in adversity; for pity is one of my prevailing passions.

Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.

Pity melts the mind to love.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity's small change in general society.

I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.

To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.

Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.

Care and pity are two different things.

I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel pity for my psychopaths, because I do.

Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual.

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond.

I've never understood pity and self-pity as an emotion.

Roger became a part of me, and when he went off the deep end and became a mad snake, I felt sorry for him.

The condition of the wounded touched my heart deeply.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

In the graver and more sentimental communication of man and man, the head still bears the superior sway; in the unreserved intimacies of man and woman, the heart is ever uppermost. Feeling is the main thing, and judgment passes for little.

The irony is that I'm actually a very empathetic person, but I don't believe in sympathy at all.