Pity
Overview
 
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
Sympathy
Sympathy is a social affinity in which one person stands with another person, closely understanding his or her feelings. Also known as empathic concern, it is the feeling of compassion or concern for another, the wish to see them better off or happier. Although empathy and sympathy are often used...

" and "empathy
Empathy
Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...

". Through insincere usage, it now has more unsympathetic connotations of feelings of superiority or condescension
Condescension
Condescension is a show of disdain and superiority in which the condescending person patronizes, or considers him/herself superior and "descends" to the level of, the disdained person.Condescension can also refer to:...

.
The word "pity" comes from the Latin word "pietas".

The word is often used in the translations from Ancient Greek into English of Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

's Poetics and Rhetoric.
Quotations

"Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?"

Bible, Matthew 18:33 (King James Version)

"No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity."

William Shakespeare, Richard III (play)|Richard III, act I, scene II.

"For pity melts the mind to love."

John Dryden Alexander's Feast (1697)

"Yet, let it not be thought that I would exclude pity from the human mind. There are scarcely any that are not, to some degree, possessed of this pleasing softness; but it is at best but a short-lived passion, and seldom affords distress more than transitory assistance; with some it scarce lasts from the first impulse till the hand can be put into the pocket…"

Oliver Goldsmith The Bee (1759) No. 3, 20 October 1759 On the Use of Language

"We pity in others only those evils which we have ourselves experienced."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Emile: Or, On Education (1762)

"O, brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;where pity dwells, the peace of God is there."

John Greenleaf Whittier Worship

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), book VII, ch. I

"The world is full of love and pity, I say. Had there been less suffering, there would have been less kindness."

William Makepeace Thackeray, The Adventures of Philip (1862), chapter XXV.

"Pity is an emotion equally unpleasant to the bestower as to the recipient."

Bolesław Prus|Bolesław Prus, The Doll (novel)|The Doll (1889).

(Said about Nienna, the fictional goddess of sorrow:) "But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope."

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (published 1977).

 
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