These pathos quotes will inspire you. Pathos, a quality that evokes pity or sadness or the quality or power in an actual life experience or in literature, music, speech, or other forms of expression, of evoking a feeling of pity, or of sympathetic and kindly sorrow or compassion.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging pathos quotes, pathos sayings, and pathos proverbs.
Best Pathos Quotes
- “The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.” ~ Lydia M. Child
- “His father watched him across the gulf of years and pathos which always must divide a father from his son.” ~ John P. Marquand
- “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
-
“Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “I’m attracted to pathos, because life is mostly pathos. I’ve had a lot of it in my life.” ~ Hector Elizondo
- “To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That’s the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.” ~ Robert Burns - “Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature’s loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.” ~ Henry Van Dyke
-
“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
- “Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer’s life is well charted.” ~ Arabella Weir
- “It is difficult for people to appreciate their own laughter unless you show them some pathos along the way.” ~ Jackie Gleason
-
“Pathos activates the eyes and ears to see and hear. At times of pathos, illness opens doors to a reality which is closed to a healthy point of view.” ~ Jean Houston
- “I have found in black metal the lyrics are profoundly beautiful… a pathos and mythos at the same time.” ~ Ryan Adams
- “The only real valuable thing is intuition.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.” ~ John F. Kennedy
-
“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
- “How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
- “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel” ~ Paul Fussell
- “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
-
“A speaker who is attempting to move people to thought or action must concern himself with Pathos.” ~ Aristotle
- “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
- “Sometimes I wonder if the semi-conscious agenda of the media is to get between people and their souls. It is the the soul with its myriad tiny nerve endings that notices the neglected pathos, poignancy and practicality that lies at the heart of life. It’s as if the media are somehow irritated and envious that anonymous people should have the quiet brilliance of their rich and sustainable inner lives.” ~ Michael Leunig
- “I always like to look on the optimistic side of life.” ~ Walt Disney
-
“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
- “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
- “Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.” ~ James Thurber
- “There is a peculiar pathos in the extinction of a nation.” ~ Homer Hulbert
-
“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
- “I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.” ~ Gunter Grass
- “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
- “The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.” ~ Ellen Glasgow
-
“The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” ~ Paul Fussell
- “I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.” ~ Walt Disney
- “Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.” ~ Susan Sontag
- “To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that’s real power.” ~ Ayn Rand
-
“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
- “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 traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” ~ Paul Fussell
- “THE SUFFERING OF GENIUS AND ITS VALUE. The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find anyone to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. That gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic?” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “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.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
-
“The real us is pure love, pure light” ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz
- “I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part.” ~ Vladimir Nabokov
- “In her presence, I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.” ~ Milan Kundera
- “For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and – by some sad, strange irony – it does not bind us, children, to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.” ~ E. M. Forster
-
“I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. With the laugh comes the tears and in developing motion pictures or television shows, you must combine all the facts of life – drama, pathos, and humor.” ~ Walt Disney
- “I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will–that is the part that’s almost unbearable.” ~ Curtis Sittenfeld
- “Go moan for man. It’s the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.” ~ Jack Kerouac
- “What is real is beyond all reach.” ~ Julian Green”Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life.” ~ Joseph Henry
-
“The pathos of man is that he hungers for personal fulfillment and for a sense of community with others.” ~ Jay Saunders Redding
- “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
- “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
- “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
-
“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
- “Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery, the feeling of righteous anger, the feelings of pathos and sadness, or sentimentality of being moved by something.” ~ Chris Hayes
- “All perfect things are saddening in effect. The autumn wood robed in its scarlet clothes, The matchless tinting on the royal rose Whose velvet leaf by no least flaw is flecked. Love’s supreme moment, when the soul unchecked Soars high as heaven, and its best rapture knows, These hold a deeper pathos than our woes Since they leave nothing better to expect.” ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox
- “The Germans have a wonderful combination of pathos, energy, and humor. They are like Californians with an education.” ~ Joan Juliet Buck
-
“I have this soft spot for have-nots. So, I was really inclined to portray their pain and pathos in ‘Highway.'” ~ Randeep Hooda
- “There’s no doubt that I really have a feeling for the theater. These past few days it has occurred to me to do a comedy whose chief characters are photographic enlargements. Those people we see in doorways. Newlyweds, sergeants, dead girls, an anonymous crowd full of mustaches and wrinkles. It should be terrible. If I focus it well, it will possess pathos without consolation. In the midst of those people, I will place an authentic fairy.” ~ Federico Garcia Lorca
- “Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.” ~ Stephen Leacock
- “The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty, and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists [Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel], first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
-
“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
- “It is the specialist’s task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist’s task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony — the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.” ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin
- “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
-
“I can tell it all in song: pathos, gladness, love, joy, unhappiness.” ~ Patti Page
- “‘The Night Cafe’ and ‘The Starry Night’ still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.” ~ Jerry Saltz
- “The ideological are individuals ultimately swamped by the complexities of modern life and political and economic relations; they have deliberately attached themselves to some caricatural maven like Falwell or Limbaugh who speaks to their manipulable pathos. The gulf between such individuals’ education or intellectual competence or information and the actual issues of our times is simply too great. They were bred to be culture-media for false consciousness, junkies who crawl on their bellies across broken glass for another hit of “clarifying wisdom” from some ideological Pope.” ~ Kenny Smith
