#pity

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. ↗

— D.H. Lawrence

#self-pity #dead

No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it. ↗

— Stefan Zweig

#conscience #guilt #stefan-zweig #conscience

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics". To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile. Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life. ↗

— Paul Davies

#chance #coincidence #fine-tuning #fred-hoyle #id

Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting. ↗

— Paul Monette

#lgbt #queer #self-esteem #self-pity #gay

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#friends #pity #school #schoolmates #memoir

Self-pity is the most destructive of all narcotics. ↗

— Sebastian Horsley

#narcotics #self-esteem #self-pity #self-esteem

Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul; You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s! Insolent in your yet-unshaken virtue, you disdained the prayers of a Penitent; But God will show mercy, though you show none. And where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from it, not opposed seduction. But the day of Trial will arrive! Oh! then when you yield to impetuous passions! when you feel that Man is weak, and born to err; When shuddering you look back upon your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of your God, Oh! in that fearful moment think upon me! Think upon your Cruelty! Think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon! ↗

— Matthew Gregory Lewis

#arrogance #callousness #catholicism #cold-hearted-people #cruelty

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for. ↗

— Lois McMaster Bujold

#serendipity #writing #writing-process #bizarre

And pity--people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you--that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful people. ↗

— Deb Caletti

#manipulation #people #pity #powerful #smarts

They say God appeared in history and used it for his purposes, but if that was so he had no pity for men. ↗

— Bernard Malamud

#history #mankind #men #pity #men