The Collaborative International Dictionary
Apathy \Ap"a*thy\, n.; pl. Apathies. [L. apathia, Gr. ?; 'a
priv. + ?, fr. ?, ?, to suffer: cf. F. apathie. See
Pathos.]
Want of feeling; privation of passion, emotion, or
excitement; dispassion; -- applied either to the body or the
mind. As applied to the mind, it is a calmness, indolence, or
state of indifference, incapable of being ruffled or roused
to active interest or exertion by pleasure, pain, or passion.
``The apathy of despair.''
--Macaulay.
A certain apathy or sluggishness in his nature which
led him . . . to leave events to take their own course.
--Prescott.
According to the Stoics, apathy meant the extinction of
the passions by the ascendency of reason.
--Fleming.
Note: In the first ages of the church, the Christians adopted the term to express a contempt of earthly concerns.
Syn: Insensibility; unfeelingness; indifference; unconcern; stoicism; supineness; sluggishness.
Wiktionary
n. (plural of apathy English)
Usage examples of "apathies".
This is the mind which makes a man suppress his hopes, which holds his apathies, which gives him irresolution when he should act and kills him before he has begun to live.
And in a single day—as in the case of a man who experiences moments of rage or a woman who drops into apathies—the condition of a person may vary from normal to insane and back to normal.
If birth included a slammed window, a slammed window may trigger birth dramatization in both, simultaneously, with resultant hostilities or apathies.
What the great Luther called, without describing them, his 'tribulations'—those dreadful doubts and apathies which at times menace and darken the radiant fabric of faith, and fill the soul with nameless horrors.
After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought.