What is "pathetic"

Usage examples of "pathetic".

Fleda knew what it was an allusion to, and his pathetic air of having received a little slap in the face, tall and fine and kind as he stood there, made her conscious of not quite concealing her knowledge.

Amer deplored, in pathetic strains, the apostasy and damnation of a son, who had renounced the promises of God, and the intercession of the prophet, to occupy, with the priests and deacons, the lowest mansions of hell.

Jezebel was mighty proud of her inheritance from her pappy and in a pathetic fit of beautification planted a few geranimus and pansies in the hard packed ground fronting the splintery porch of the dwelling.

The eunuch was Yusif, the same pathetic specimen he had browbeaten on his last visit.

At the sixth a pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted to take a family to board, and would give them a private table at a rate which the Marches would have thought low in Boston.

I had dropped from the semireputable status of a psychic or a newspaper astrologer to the pathetic one of a palmist or a flying-saucer nut.

When the thing is maintained, not as a mere windy sentimentality, but with some notion of carrying it logically, the result is invariably a display of paralogy so absurd that it becomes pathetic.

The rabid determination of partizan politicians not to allow the United States to enter into any agreement with the rest of the world to stop war, the outbreaks of violence among the criminal classes, the determined efforts of the liquor interests to nullify the constitutional Prohibition amendment, the depression in business, the increase of unemployment, the strenuous effort of the agitators to make trouble between this country and Great Britain on one side and Japan on the other, all may be grouped with this pathetic spectacle of respectable women turned shoplifters as an indication of that other moral slump from idealism.

His condition was unchanged,--the wan beams of the early clay falling cross his features intensified their waxen stillness and pallor,--the awful majesty of death was on him,--the pathetic helplessness and perishableness of Body without Spirit.

We sat beneath a spreading oak, huddled together and hunched over like a quintet of pathetic apes while the rain sluiced over us and chilled us to the bone.

He joined Quinton in the wheelhouse, taking in the disorder, the flaking paintwork, the ragged, half-naked helmsman made more pathetic by his seamen with their levelled weapons.

Muoth was wretched and self-tormented, the charming woman was pathetic and miserable as the lady friend of a restless sensualist who knew no joy, and yet she was good and kind and acquainted with suffering.

But at least, and at last, she had done this amazing thing, and would never be a pathetic spinster ever again.

His eyes softened with a dreamy, intense lustre that gave them a new and almost pathetic beauty, while Theos, listening to each word he uttered, wondered whether there were ever any sounds sweeter than the rise and fall of his exquisite voice,--a voice as deliciously clear and mellow as a golden flute tenderly played.

There had even been the pathetic instance of Eve, in the early days of Sparcot, who had borne a girl to Major Trouter and then disappeared.