"Beware of Pity, his first venture in longer fiction, is original and powerful work…Zweig has chronicled a hopeless and tragic relationship in a manner that so holds the reader as never to dispirit him, telling a story full of psychological pitfalls that only an experienced writer, and an experienced human being could dare to attempt…Zweig remains, after Beware of Pity, what he seemed to be–in his novelettes and biographies–before he wrote it: a brilliant writer." —The New York Times
"Admired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini, Thomas Mann and Herman Goering." —The New York Times
"Herr Zweig presents this story with considerable skill, with compelling force…It is a good story." —The New York Times
"What is so impressive about Beware of Pity is Zweig’s ability to make us feel the violently shifting emotions of all his characters as if they were our own. Only a writer of great sensitivity could do this. His theme, or moral, which he does not obtrude on us in any clumsy way, is that impulsive pity for others is a dangerous emotion with embroils us in false situations, often with disastrous results." —Sunday Telegraph
"Beware of Pity is an utterly unsparing dissection of the corruptions of false pity…In stripping away the lies with which we disguise our true desires from ourselves, Zweig lays bare the larger lies of the age: it was, in fact, the perfect novel for that ‘low, dishonest decade,’ as Auden termed it." —The New York Sun
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