Pity

Pity

Pity originally means feeling for others, particularly feelings of sadness or sorrow, and was once used in a comparable sense to the more modern words "sympathy" and "empathy". Through insincere usage, it now has more unsympathetic connotations of feelings of superiority or condescension.

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Famous quotes containing the word pity:

    But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    There are some women ... in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else. Love is scarcely felt before duty rushes to encase it, anger impossible because one must always be calm and see both sides, pity evaporates in expedients, even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.
    Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978)

    Come, ye Sinners, poor and wretched,
    Weak and wounded, sick and sore.
    Jesus ready stands to save you,
    Full of Pity join’d with Pow’r.
    He is able, he is able, he is able;
    He is willing: doubt no more.
    Joseph Hart (1712–1768)