Top 100 Quotes About Pathos
#1. In their efforts to provide a sufficiency of water where there was not one, men have resorted to every expedient from prayer to dynamite. The story of their efforts is, on the whole, one of pathos and tragedy, of a few successes and many failures
Walter Prescott Webb
#2. I guess what I always found funny was the human condition. There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents. Like, when a driver has parked his car crookedly and then wonders why he has the bad luck of being hit.
John Prine
#3. Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.
Susan Sontag
#4. [Heraclitus had] the highest form of pride [stemming] from a certainty of belief in the truth as grasped by himself alone. He brings this form, by its excessive development, into a sublime pathos by involuntary identification of himself with his truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#5. I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.
Gunter Grass
#6. Preach not calmly and quietly as though you were asleep, but preach with fire and pathos and passion.
Charles Spurgeon
#7. All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.
Paul Fussell
#9. English is much drier. You can get away with a lot less. Pathos, lyricism, these are things you have to tone down if you want the English version of the book to work.
Daniel Kehlmann
#10. His father watched him across the gulf of years and pathos which always must divide a father from his son.
John Phillips Marquand
#11. But the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy.
Alexandra Fuller
#12. The pathos of man is that he hungers for personal fulfillment and for a sense of community with others.
Jay Saunders Redding
#13. There is a sort of pathos about it when one remembers how few are your days, how childish your pomps, and what shadows you are!
Mark Twain
#14. A speaker who is attempting to move people to thought or action must concern himself with Pathos.
Aristotle.
#15. With 'The Office' and 'Extras' I've always snuck in a little bit of heart and pathos - and drama, which is fun.
Ricky Gervais
#16. I think it would be exhausting and depressing, to write, to watch and to live, if it was just focused on drama. It's heavy. Also, I think the humor really highlights the pathos and the struggle. You can slam it up against drama, and it makes both shine.
Jenji Kohan
#17. The Germans have a wonderful combination of pathos, energy, and humor. They are like Californians with an education.
Joan Juliet Buck
#18. De Quincey compared the two arts of rhetoric, logos and pathos, to rudder and sail. The first guides discourse and the second powers it (Thonssen and Baird, 1948, p. 358). Even
Haddon Robinson
#19. Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.
Gilles Deleuze
#20. I like to play characters that get to do it all - to have a bit of comedy here and a bit of pathos here and a bit of suspense here, that's what's fun.
Michael Shannon
#21. I liked the warmth of her body against mine and realized the pathos of being a human. Of being a mortal creature who was essentially alone but needed the myth of togetherness with others. Friends, children, lovers. It was an attractive myth. It was a myth you could easily inhabit.
Matt Haig
#22. I meant to write a song of battle, for storied deeds of war inspire; I seemed to hear the cannon thunder, I seemed to see the smoke and fire. But oh, the pathos of the ending when brave men conquered in the fight, knelt, kissing yielded blood-stained colors!
my eyes are blurred, I cannot write.
Anne Reeve Aldrich
#23. I believe that it was the Greeks who said that great messages were composed of logos and pathos - content and passion.
Bryan Loritts
#24. The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.
Arabella Weir
#25. On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it
that disgusts me
C.S. Lewis
#27. It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.
Wallace Stegner
#28. A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#29. Maybe what life needs is a good soundtrack, especially during the long stretches when nothing interesting is being said. A soundtrack might dignify things a bit, ennobling us with the proper drama and tension and pathos.
Jonathan Hull
#30. I am a big fan of the TV series 'Taxi' which combined comedy and pathos better than any other show I've seen.
Douglas Wood
#31. The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death. They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colors of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them.
Joseph Roth
#32. None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.
Pope John Paul II
#33. (Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his 'pomposity' and 'oily pathos',
Tom Service
#34. And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
John Ashbery
#35. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
Susan Sontag
#36. What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child's part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy.
Henry James
#37. Annoyance and pathos warred in my breast, and after a short struggle, annoyance punched pathos in the snout like the voracious shark it was.
Kate Elliott
#38. Comedy doesn't really have any meaning without sadness ... The most meaningful comedy comes from some really serious pathos.
Becky Stark
#39. There is reason to smile and celebrate when you win, but when you struggle, that is about laughter. That is the pathos that is rooted in all comedy. And business is full of pain and hardship and with that, laughter and release.
Ronnie Apteker
#40. German can take a lot more pathos than English can. When you say "pathetic" in English it's a disparaging term, but when you say "pathetisch" in German it's just a description, not necessarily negative. That says a lot already.
Daniel Kehlmann
#41. The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence..
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#42. At first the cartoon medium was just a novelty, but it never really began to hit until we had more than tricks ... until we developed personalities. We had to get beyond getting a laugh. They may roll in the aisles, but that doesn't mean you have a great picture. You have pathos in the thing.
Walt Disney
#43. It will startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times-to Death, if we give the matter the right word! ... We read in Dead Men's books! We laugh at Dead Men's jokes, and cry at Dead Men's pathos! ... Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man's icy hand obstructs us!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#44. There is no deeper pathos in the spiritual life of man than the cruelty of righteous people. If any one idea dominates the teachings of Jesus, it is his opposition to the self-righteousness of the righteous.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#45. I never met Barbara Cartland. But now that I'm working on her life, I wish I had. I think there was a lot of pathos in it and I'm intrigued by her.
Mel Smith
#46. Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
James Thurber
#47. The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait - I didn't intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan.
Anne Lamott
#48. I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.
Philip Guston
#49. I have this soft spot for have-nots. So, I was really inclined to portray their pain and pathos in 'Highway.'
Randeep Hooda
#50. There is no pathos in real misery, no luxury in real grief.
Jerome K. Jerome
#51. Haunted from my early youth by the transitoriness and pathos of life, I was aware that it is not enough to say "I am doing no harm," I ought to be testing myself daily, and asking myself what I am really achieving.
Margot Asquith
#52. In fact, if anybody on the Somme battlefield is overdue to be treated with a little pathos it is not the attackers, with their threefold artillery superiority, total control of the air and copious reserves of of manpower, but rather the German defenders opposite.
Alexander Watson
#53. The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.
Jean Baudrillard
#54. Originally, I thought, 'Gollum's such a fantastic character, why are you doing him CG? Surely you need to be able to humanise him as much as possible - he's so full of pathos and real emotion.'
Andy Serkis
#55. To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.
Robert Burns
#57. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her,
F Scott Fitzgerald
#58. I'm attracted to pathos, because life is mostly pathos. I've had a lot of it in my life.
Hector Elizondo
#59. There is no pathos more bitter than that of parting from someone we have never met.
P.G. Wodehouse
#60. Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life.
Joseph Henry
#61. I didn't expect to feel pathos for the villains in our show. I feel quite moved in several of our episodes; I never realized that a show like 'Motive,' which aims for a broad appeal, could have that sort of emotional impact.
Kristin Lehman
#62. Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.
Jack Kerouac
#63. I do like characters that have flaws, some sort of pathos to them that they are trying to sort out.
Nicolas Cage
#64. In the course of my life, I've made some happy songs but it's the more sort of like pathos-laden, emotional, melancholic music that either I make or that other people make that really resonates with me.
Moby
#65. I've really enjoyed the independent film world. I've had a blast. But, the reality is that I really want to make bigger movies. If I could make movies that carry great characters and great performances and great pathos, and can have an explosion or two, that would be fine with me.
Matthew Lillard
#66. To a nice ear, the quality of a voice is singularly affecting. Its depth seems to be allied to feeling; at least, the contralto notes alone give an adequate sense of pathos. They are born near the heart.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#67. We're all real people with moments of intense honesty and pathos and humanity. We all experience that, whether you're comedic or not.
Bob Odenkirk
#68. Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required.
Michel Faber
#69. Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
E. M. Forster
#70. The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class ...
Emma Goldman
#71. When the soul-penetrating pathos she was beaming at me failed to prevent me from continuing to put things in boxes, the helper dog became increasingly alarmed. Over the ensuing few days, she slowly descended into psychological chaos. The simple dog remained unfazed.
Allie Brosh
#72. Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration.
H.P. Lovecraft
#73. With the passage of years, not all of Dicken's readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation's sublimity became another generation's kitsch.
Peter Gay
#74. In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.
Peter Straub
#75. ...saving a life and nurturing a life are different processes, and that to succeed in the former one must dispense with the pathos of the latter.
Anthony Marra
#76. If you make a great film full of emotion, of pathos, people want to continue to know more, to work harder.
Pamela Yates
#77. There is a third quality to friendship, and it is not as easy to put into a single word. The right word, literally, is "sympathy" - sym-pathos, common passion. This means that friendships are discovered more than they are created at will.
Timothy Keller
#78. Criticism has already settled all accounts with this subject. It no longer figures as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.
Karl Marx
#79. Companions in pathos,who barely murmur,go with your lamp spent and return the jewels. A new mystery sings in your bones. Cultivate your legitimate strangeness.
Rene Char
#80. Reading more than life teaches us to recognize ethos and pathos.
Mason Cooley
#81. It is difficult for people to appreciate their own laughter unless you show them some pathos along the way.
Jackie Gleason
#83. When you see a bad romantic comedy, you see the script, the director, and the actors trying to create this warmth and this pathos and this feeling that you care about them. That cannot be manufactured - it's either there or it isn't.
Jeff Garlin
#84. This is real human drama, we're not creating some amusement park ride for the summer. Even though the movie is really exciting to watch, it's got a real pathos behind it.
John C. Reilly
#85. In the tradition of Black Hawk Down, Malcolm MacPherson vividly brings to life this harrowing story of courage, pathos, and war at its grittiest. For military history buffs, or those interested in the front lines of the war on terror, Roberts Ridge is a must read.
Jay Winik
#86. The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
Soren Kierkegaard
#87. The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
Susan Sontag
#88. People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.
G.K. Chesterton
#89. I have found in black metal the lyrics are profoundly beautiful ... a pathos and mythos at the same time.
Ryan Adams
#90. There is more or less of pathos in all true beauty. The delight it awakens has an indefinable, and, as it were, luxurious sadness, which is perhaps one element of its might.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#91. My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.
Marilynne Robinson
#94. I can tell it all in song: pathos, gladness, love, joy, unhappiness.
Patti Page
#95. Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.
Paul Kalanithi
#96. On the top of my desk there are initials, carved into the wood, and dates ... This carving, done with a pencil dug many times into the warn varnish of the desk, has the pathos of all vanished civilizations. It's like a handprint on stone. Whoever made this was once alive.
Margaret Atwood
#97. Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.
Stephen Leacock
#98. The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.
Lydia M. Child
#99. Manga is virtual. Manga is sentiment. Manga is resistance. Manga is bizarre. Manga is pathos. Manga is destruction. Manga is arrogance. Manga is love. Manga is kitsch. Manga is sense of wonder. Manga is ... there is no conclusion yet.
Osamu Tezuka
#100. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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