I.
Prometheus (1816)
Context: Titan! to whom immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.
Source: Julian and Maddalo http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel115.html (1819), l. 482
Ibid., p. 77
The Book of Disquiet
Original: O que é doença é desejar com igual intensidade o que é preciso e o que ´desejável, e sofrer por não ser perfeito como se se sofresse por não ter pão. O mal romântico é este: é querer a lua como se houvesse maneira de a obter.
“Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.”
Source: Pride and Prejudice
“Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?”
Source: NOS4A2
Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Karma
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 86.
“If we love mankind, pity them, we even wish to suffer for them.”
A Hazard Of New Fortunes, Ch. XI
Context: The life of Christ, it wasn't only in healing the sick and going about to do good; it was suffering for the sins of others. That's as great a mystery as the mystery of death. Why should there be such a principle in the world? But it's been felt, and more or less dumbly, blindly recognized ever since Calvary. If we love mankind, pity them, we even wish to suffer for them. That's what has created the religious orders in all times--the brotherhoods and sisterhoods that belong to our day as much as to the mediaeval past. That's what is driving a girl like Margaret Vance, who has everything that the world can offer her young beauty, on to the work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the dying.
Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
