Compassion is the most agreeable feeling for those who have little pride and no prospect of great conquests; for them, easy prey - and that is what those who suffer are - is something enchanting. Compassion is praised as the virtue of the gay lady.
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §13
The relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process: activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker's physical and mental energy as an activity which is turned against him, independent and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement.