“That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it.”

—  Robin Hobb , book Ship of Destiny

Source: Ship of Destiny

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as…" by Robin Hobb?
Robin Hobb photo
Robin Hobb 76
American fiction writer (pseudonym) 1952

Related quotes

Maya Angelou photo

“There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

As quoted in The Truth in Words (2005) by Neal Zero

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

Paul Monette (1945–1995) American writer
Robert A. Heinlein photo

“You can only grieve so much; after that it’s self pity.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Farmer in the Sky

Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 18, “Pioneer Party” (p. 188)

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems of life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above self. And so they end up the tragic victims of self-centeredness. They end up the victims of distorted and disrupted personality.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Variants (Many of MLKs' speeches were delivered many times with slight variants): An Individual has not started living fully until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity. Every person must decide at some point, whether they will walk in light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment: Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'
As quoted in The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Coretta Scott King, Second Edition (2011), Ch. "Community of Man", p. 3
1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

W. H. Auden photo

“All pity is self-pity.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Interlude: West's Disease", p. 243
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

John Dryden photo

“Like you, an alien in a land unknown,
I learn to pity woes so like my own.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Aeneis, Book I, lines 889–890.
The Works of Virgil (1697)

Roger Ebert photo

“Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent… I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050922/REVIEWS/509220303/1023 of Dirty Love (23 September 2005)
Reviews, Zero star reviews

George du Maurier photo

“Life ain’t all beer and skittles, and more’s the pity; but what’s the odds, so long as you’re happy?”

George du Maurier book Trilby

Trilby (1894).

Orson Scott Card photo

“Show him who I am, so he will pity me instead of fearing me. And then we can turn pity into compassion, and compassion into understanding, and understanding into affection, and affection into love, and love into life, the life of our children, the life of the new self we will become together.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Ships Of Earth (1994)

Related topics