Lìtost (Czech) - Lítost means literally "compassion" but the Czech author Milan Kundera gave it an ironic twist in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by defining it as "a state of torment created by the sight of one man's own misery". He went on: "A feeling as infinite as an open accordion - a synthesis of many others, grief, sympathy, remorse and indefinable longing - I do not see how anyone can understand the human condition without it."