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Self-pity is excessive, self-absorbed unhappiness over one’s own troubles

• Self-pity: Excessive, self-absorbed unhappiness over one’s own troubles. Oxford Dictionary
• Self-pity: A feeling of pity for yourself because you believe you have suffered more than is fair or reasonable. Merriam Webster
• Self-pity: Pity for oneself, especially a self-indulgent attitude concerning one’s own difficulties, hardships, etc. Dictionary.com
• Despair,  Unhappiness,  Suffering,  Victim mentality,  Self-compassion

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Self-pity is a form of self-indulgence and idleness …

• Self indulgent: Excessive or unrestrained gratification of one’s own appetites, desires, or whims. Merriam Webster
• Self-pity: A self-indulgent dwelling on one’s own sorrows or misfortunes. Merriam Webster
• Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. Tom Robbins
• Being sorry for myself is a luxury I can’t afford. Stephen King
• Time spent in pitying oneself is the worst kind of idleness. Earl Riney
• Idleness

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… a kind of party you invite yourself to

• I try to skip all invitations to pity parties, they just wear me out.
• I used to have a real problem with self-pity. Every time the devil would throw a pity party, I would attend. Joyce Meyer

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Self-pity is a form of pride and egocentrism

• Fits of anger, vexation,and bitterness against ourselves tend to pride and they spring from no other source than self-love, which is disturbed and upset at seeing that it is imperfect. Francis de Sale
• This is difficult to say without feeling harsh and judgmental, but here goes–self-pity is an extreme form of egocentrism, and usually a result of a very selfish perspective of the world. People who regularly engage in self- pity are miserable, and they tend to make others quite unhappy, too. Tom Walsch
• I don’t want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its “problems” because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over, and feel sorry for myself, and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God. It gives definition to my self-image, makes me into someone, and that is all that matters to the ego. Eckhart Tolle
• Pride

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… and comes from total identification with the mind

• Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind, which is to say as long as you are unconscious, physically speaking. I am talking here primarily of emotional pain, which is also the main cause of physical pain and physical disease.  Resentment, hatred, self-pity, guilt, anger, depression, jealousy, and so on, even the slightest irritation, are all forms of pain.  Eckhart Tolle
• Transcending the ego,  The mind

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Self-pity is a useless emotion that achieves nothing

• He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn’t work. It wasn’t just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered incorrect. It was more than that–it didn’t work. Gary Paulsen
• I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity. Gabrielle Zevin
• Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world – making the most of one’s best. Harry Emerson Fosdick
• Emotions

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Self-pity comes at a heavy price

• Self-pity is like a snake that gets in your brain and lays its eggs there. Steve Chandler
• Self-pity causes more wrecks than misfortune. W.A. MacKenzie
• Self-pity is one of the most unhappy and consuming defects that we know. It is a bar to all spiritual progress and can cut off all effective communication. Bill
• Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world. Helen Keller
• Self-pity slays self-respect. B.C. Forbes
• Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul. Paul Hoffman
• You can never win when you wear the ugly cloak of self-pity and the sour sound of whining. Og Mandino
• You can overcome anything if you don’t bellyache. Bernard Baruch

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Self-pity is a destructive and corrosive vice

• Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have – more than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins – is self-pity. Self-pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred’s a subset of self-pity and not the other way around – ‘It destroys everything around it, except itself.’ Self-pity will destroy relationships, it’ll destroy anything that’s good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it’s so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. Stephen Fry
• Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to be caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self. Millicent Fenwick
• There are few human emotions as warm, comforting, and enveloping as self-pity. And nothing is more corrosive and destructive. There is only one answer; turn away from it and move on. Dr Megan Reik
• Which eats holes in happiness self-pity is an acid. Earl Nightingale
• Self-pity is the highway to self-destruction. William W. Seegmiller
• Vice

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Self-pity weakens you …

• Hence, the man who pities himself is a man whose vital processes are preeminently sluggish. It could not be otherwise, in view of the known physical effects of depressing mental states. H. Addington Bruce
• Once you begin to pity yourself you are likely always to have cause to pity yourself. That is the peculiar danger of self-pity. Like a vampire that sucks the life energy out of the man who allows it to take possession of him. H. Addington Bruce
• To whine means to indulge in self-pity. This leads to personal deterioration. It insidiously weakens character. It robs of strength. Anybody who is persistently sorry for himself is in the twilight zone. Floyd Poe
• Weakness

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… and sets you up to fail

• Each day is a special gift from God, and while life may not always be fair, you must never allow the pains, hurdles, and handicaps of the moment to poison your attitude and plans for yourself and your future. You can never win when you wear the ugly cloak of self-pity, and the sour sound of whining will certainly frighten away any opportunity for success. Never again. There is a better way. Og Mandino
• Don’t pity yourselves. The moment that a man begins to pity himself he loses stamina, he loses will power, he loses initiative, and unless he can master his self-pity, he is on the road and far along the road to a life of failure. Reuben Clark
• One of the most deadly and disastrous attitudes a man can develop is that of self-pity. Next to fear, self-pity weakens more great ambitions, kills more noble dreams, and turns to flight more courageous onslaughts on the camps of wickedness than any other single foe. J. Richard Palmer
• Remember that self-pity breeds weakness. It steals your self-reliance. Every failure and every adversity you meet brings you a wonderful opportunity to test your own moral courage. You become a stronger person because of it. Napoleon Hill
• Failure

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Self-pity sucks you in and immobilises you

• Self-pity is a death that has no resurrection, a sinkhole from which no rescuing hand can drag you because you have chosen to sink. Elizabeth Elliot
• Pity is like a swamp. The longer we stand in the muck, the more we stink. Nancy Hull-Mast
• Self-pity is like a clog in the pipe that stops the flow of life. It is the hand that takes rather than gives. J. Nicole Williamson
• To begin extending pity to yourself is the sure herald of a coming slump. There are times when one may feel that the world is against him and that fate is upper cutting with both hands. The only comeback possible under this condition is renewed determination to get going again–and no renewed determination is possible with self- pity eating one’s fiber away. Grantland Rice

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Self-pity corrodes the soul

• The teeth of self-pity had gnawed away her essential self. Willa Gibbs
• Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul. Paul Hoffman
• The soul

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Self-pity destroys happiness

• Never feel sorry for yourself – it has a deadly effect on spiritual well-being. Mildred Norman
• Which eats holes in happiness self-pity is an acid. Earl Nightingale
• The human mind can bear plenty of reality, but not too much unintermittent gloom. Margaret Drabble
• A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is. Seneca
• Happiness

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Self-pity amplifies pain

• .. is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread. Michael Pollan
• Pain,  Suffering

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Self-pity makes you so absorbed in yourself that you’re blind to the suffering of others

• Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people’s sorrow. George Eliot
• It’s odd that you can get so anesthetized by your own pain or your own problem that you don’t quite fully share the hell of someone close to you. Lady Bird Johnson
• Feeling sorry for yourself leads to selfishness and an indifference toward the rest of humanity, and a selfish woman or an indifferent woman is never going to find the lovely and most-to-be-desired paths in life; she is too engrossed in self to see or thing anything else. Harriot Russell
• The attitude, “Why me?” hints at the little compassion we generally feel for others’ suffering. Our empathy with others, even our awareness of their suffering, is generally minimal. We are much too involved in our own. Were we less self-centered, we’d see that blessings and tragedies visit us all, in equal amounts. Some people respond to their blessings with equanimity, and they quietly remove the sting from their tragedies. We can learn to do both. Karen Casey
• Compassion

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Self-pity blocks you from what you want

• Don’t feel sorry for yourself unless you want to get into a frame of mind which will as effectively shut you off from the things you desire as though you were to build about yourself a high wall. Harriot Russell

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Self-pity makes you wearisome and unattractive to others

• To hear complaints is wearisome to the wretched and the happy alike. Samuel Johnson
• Grumbling is the death of love. Marlene Dietrich
• I tell people to monitor their self-pity. Self-pity is very unattractive. Patty Duke

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Self-pity is like rolling around in your own waste

• Self-pity is like a dog eating its own vomit or a pig rolling around in its own waste. Keith Cameron
• It’s all right to sit on your pity pot every now and again. Just be sure to flush when you are finished. Debbie Macomber

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Self-pity is a narcotic …

• Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble. It is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality – a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict. Eugene H Peterson
• self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality. John Gardner
• Self-pity is the most destructive of all narcotics. Sebastian Horsley
• Self-pity is the most effective narcotic yet discovered. Like the drug habit, it grows on one. Hamilton G. Park

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… a narcotic that distorts reality …

• Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror. Anne Roiphe
• Self-pity is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality. Eugene H Peterson
• I am convinced, the longer I live, that life and its blessings are not so entirely unjustly distributed as when we are suffering greatly we are inclined to suppose. Mary Todd Lincoln
• When you pity yourself you begin to think of yourself as the center of creation, a sort of central sun around which the stars revolve–or should. You are out of focus. Elbert Hubbard
• It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos. Manly Hall
• Self-pity is one of the most dangerous forms of self-centeredness. It fogs our vision.
• Illusion,  Reality

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… by exaggerating the negative and negating the positive

• Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up. Dag Hammarskjold
• When we pity ourselves all we see is ourselves. When we have problems, all we see are our problems and that’s all what we love of talking about. We don’t see the good things in our lives. Ann Marie Aguilar
• Negativity

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Self-pity can become a habit …

• Feeling sorry for yourself and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have. Dale Carnegie
• Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach. Sydney Smith
• Habit

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… required in larger and larger doses

• Self-pity is the greatest dope in the world. … Self-pity is insidious. You have to keep taking it in larger doses to get any kick out of it. For a while, your mourning may excite the sympathy of others. But your fellowmen can feel sorry for you only so long. After that, you bore and irritate them. All of us have adversity in plentiful doses. No one has a monopoly. If a man bends it and broods over it, he can soon build up a pretty good case that the stars in their courses are fighting against him. He increases his doses until a permanent quitter is born. And his story ends right there–save for some forlorn footnotes! Merle Crowell

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Some even argue self-pity is a kind of disease

• Self-pity is the first symptom of paranoia. And paranoia is a disease of the brain that comes from continually thinking of one’s own self and dwelling on slights and fancied results. Elbert Hubbard
• Misery is a communicable disease. Martha Graham
• Illness

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Self-pity often comes naturally to us

• Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us. The most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool. Andre Maurois
• Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity. Stephen Vincent Benet

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Transcend self-pity by recognising that hardship is part of life

• Self-pity embraces in its sweep the inability to accept hard luck or unexpected trouble as part of the game. Self-    pity curls one up in the face of misfortune. Self-pity means wasted time where you should be fighting all the harder to swing your luck into the proper channel, or to force yourself over fate’s barricade. Grantland Rice
• Self-pity is a parasite that feeds on itself. Many of us are inclined toward self-pity, not allowing for the balance of life’s natural tragedies. We will face good and bad times-and they will pass. With certainty they will pass. Karen Casey
• Challenge,  Adversity,  Life is difficult but worthwhile

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Transcend self-pity by recognising hardship as an opportunity to grow

• Never feel sorry for yourself – it has a deadly effect on spiritual well-being. Recognize all problems, no matter how difficult, as opportunities for spiritual growth, and make the most of these opportunities. Mildred Norman
• We would better take the bumps that life sends and regard them as lessons. Life is a struggle against our own limitations. Elbert Hubbard
• Opportunity,  Growth

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Transcend self-pity by facing challenges courageously

• The first reaction to a difficulty is usually rebellion or self-pity. Most people try self-pity. “If I had the talent of another, if I could only get the breaks,” are some of the things we say to ourselves. A man must talk to himself more bravely and courageously than that, if he is to get anywhere. Frank Tripp
• Remember that self-pity breeds weakness. It steals your self-reliance. Every failure and every adversity you meet brings you a wonderful opportunity to test your own moral courage. You become a stronger person because of it. Napoleon Hill
• Face challenges head on

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Transcend self-pity by learning better responses

• Recovery is learning new responses, feeling and behaving in healthier ways. Self-pity need not catch us. We can always feel it coming on. And we can let it go. Karen Casey
• Self-pity may beckon, today. Fortunately, I have learned I have other choices. Karen Casey

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Transcend self-pity by getting up and doing something

• I got the blues thinking about the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges or scrub the floor. D. H. Lawrence
• The cure for grief is motion. Elbert Hubbard
• The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation. George Bernard Shaw
• When you find yourself overpowered, as it were, by melancholy, the best way is to go out and do something. John Keble
• Action,  Proactiveness

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Transcend self-pity by making the most of what you have

• Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world – making the most of one’s best. Harry Emerson Fosdick
• Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can. Henry David Thoreau

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Transcend self-pity through self-knowledge

• Only self-knowledge can free us from self-righteousness and self-pity. Self-examination is realism. The [man] who does not vibrate the thrill of knowing who he is may easily develop a martyr-complex and hide under a halo of intellectual haze. Self-inquiry [is] continually striv[ing] to relate our inner selves to a complex outer world. … Once we understand who we are and where we have been we can better determine where we ought to go. Now listening to these words are the architects of tomorrow–You are so much more important than you think you are. Humility, certainly, but an arrogance about the cause to which we have dedicated ourselves. If we are on the side of right, it will win! If we are to be defeated, we must defeat ourselves. … Our attitudes and values are the lenses through which we see and interpret our real world to others. John W. Harold
• Self-awareness,  Self-knowledge

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Transcend self-pity by not taking things so seriously …

• Hold on to your humility. All self-misery has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in taking life too seriously.  If you take everything too seriously, especially yourself, you’ll wind up fearing every new step you take.   Marc and Angel Chernoff
• Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life. Anthony Powell

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… by learning to laugh at life and yourself

• Laugh at yourself and at life. Not in the spirit of derision or whining self-pity, but as a remedy, a miracle drug, that will ease your pain, cure your depression, and help you to put in perspective that seemingly terrible defeat and worry with laughter at your predicaments, thus freeing your mind to think clearly toward the solution that is certain to come. Never take yourself too seriously. Og Mandino
• There’s only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and forget everybody else! It sound egotistical, but it’s actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity. Anne Frank
• Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that nlightness of touch which gives understanding of life. Anthony Powell
• Laughter

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Transcend self-pity through acceptance of what is

• Accept fate, and move on. Don’t yield to the seductive pull of self-pity. Acting like a victim threatens your future.
• When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing–deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different. John Galsworthy
• Acceptance,  Accept this moment as it is

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Transcend self-pity by being grateful you’re alive

• Life is a shooting of the chutes. Take your bumps, and don’t whine. There are quiet and safety, and rest and silence, down at the bottom where we are headed for, and there will be plenty of time to enjoy them, too. But just now there is work to do. Let’s be grateful that we are alive. Elbert Hubbard
• To have pain is proof that you are alive. Dead ones have no pain. Those who are alive are bound to suffer. This is part of the great education of every individual who really lives and achieves. Elbert Hubbard
• Gratitude,  Appreciation,  Being fully alive

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Transcend self-pity by recognising mistakes and failure as lessons

• Mistakes are a drag, because you get in the area of regret and self-pity. Carrie Fisher
• Mistakes,  Failure,  Learning

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Transcend self-pity by opening your eyes to the suffering of others

• Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow. Awareness of others is a healthy antidote to this self-focus. Kevin Malarkey
• Suffering

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Transcend self-pity through irony

• A sharp sense of the ironic can be the equivalent of the faith that moves mountains. Far more quickly than reason or logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity. Moss Hart

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Transcend self-pity by letting go of the need to complain

• When any fit of gloominess, or perversion of mind, lays hold upon you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaints. Samuel Johnson
• This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction. Henry David Thoreau
• He who complains, sins. Saint Francis de Sales
• Complaining,  Negativity

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Don’t take self-pity seriously

• You will surely smile with me when I say, ‘Thank God one can still recognise self-pity as such and not give it any greater dignity than just that.’ James Fox

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Here are some more antidotes to self-pity

• The best mask for demoralization is daring. Lucan
• The best remedy for self-pity is responsibility. Roy L. Smith

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Some argue that self-pity can have its place

• God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease. Albert Camus
• More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple pity that will not forsake us. George Eliot

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Allow yourself small doses of self-pity …

• 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. Breena Clarke
• Self-compassion

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… but never dwell in it

• It’s all right to sit on your pity pot every now and again. Just be sure to flush when you are finished. Debbie Macomber
• Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable. Maya Angelou

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Avoid self-pity, but have compassion for yourself …

• Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion. George R. Gissing
• Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion. Buddha
• If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. Jack Kornfield
• Compassion for yourself translates into compassion for others. Suki Jay Munsell
• Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others. Pema Chodron
• Studies have shown that self-compassion has many benefits, including reducing self-criticism, lowering stress hormones like cortisol, increasing self-soothing, self-encouragement, and other aspects of resilience and helping to heal any shortages of caring from others in your childhood. Rick Hanson
• Self-compassion

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… for self-compassion leads to greater compassion for others

• So how do we learn to be compassionate? The people who are best at being compassionate toward others have learned to be compassionate with themselves, first.  Someone who talks lovingly to himself or herself excels in speaking loving words to others, and the opposite is true.  If you verbally beat yourself up as a habit, you will tend to be negative toward other people, too.  Lucinda Bassett
• Compassion for others comes naturally as you recognize your own limitations. Stephen C. Paul
• It is lack of love for ourselves that inhibits our compassion toward others. If we make friends with ourselves, then there is no obstacle to opening our hearts and minds to others.
• When the Dalai Lama was then asked to clarify whether indeed the object of compassion may be the self, he responded: ‘Yourself first, and then in a more advanced way the aspiration will embrace others. In a way, high levels of compassion are nothing but an advanced state of that self- interest. That’s why it is hard for people who have a strong sense of self- hatred to have genuine compassion toward others. There is no anchor, no basis to start from. Tal Ben- Shahar
• Compassion

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By all means pity others, but not yourself

• Pity is based in self-love; it is benevolence towards those in sorrow, and its root is in a likeness to ourselves. Henry Lee Irwin
• Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble. It is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality – a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict. Eugene H Peterson

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Watch out for guilt for it can turn into self-pity

• Guilt can quickly turn into regret and self-pity. The only way out is through acceptance and forgiveness.
• Guilt

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Don’t play into the self-pity of others

• If someone decides they’re not going to be happy, it’s not your problem. You don’t have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing into their self-pity. Joyce Meyer

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Stop being a martyr

• Are you giving all your time and energy to someone who doesn’t appreciate it? Do you sometimes think of yourself as a martyr? Does the word “sacrifice” creep into your mind more than just once in a while?  Many people martyr themselves in relationships and no one notices.    Martyrs seem to give a great deal, but no one thanks them, or at least not often enough.  The reason is that the martyr’s stock-in-trade is guilt–“I’ve done so much for you.”  Because guilt doesn’t feel good, not only do people forget to say “thank you,” they usually stay away.    The martyr is furious–“I’ve done so much and I’ve received so little in return.” In fact, martyrs don’t give to other people, only to themselves.  They just use other people as the foil.  Try caring and loving, and expecting the same in return.  Don’t opt for suffering in the hope that someday they will recognize how wonderful you are. They won’t. Jennifer James

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• It’s all right to sit on your pity pot every now and again. Just be sure to flush when you are finished. Debbie Macomber
• Others may argue about whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper. I just want to make sure mine doesn’t end with a whine. Barbara Gordon

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