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Pity is an emotion, usually resulting from an encounter with an unfortunate, injured, or pathetic person or creature. A person experiencing pity will often take mercy on the person/creature, giving them aid or money. Many people pity the homeless, orphans, the terminally ill, and victims of rape and torture.

Because pity will often result in people aiding the pitiful, most people consider it a positive thing. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, however, believed that pity causes an otherwise normal person to feel the suffering of others; "Pity makes suffering contagious," he says in The Antichrist. He felt that it is important not to make oneself feel superior to the person you are taking pity on. This imbalance could result in retaliation against the help. People value their sense of pride, and pity can negatively affect the situation.

Mystic poet William Blake is ambivalent about the emotion Pity. In The Book of Urizen Pity begins when Los looks on the body of Urizen bound in chains (Urizen 13.50-51). However, Pity furthers the fall, "For pity divides the soul" (13.53), dividing Los and Enitharmon, who is named Pity at her birth. Critics of this work assert: "Pity defuses the power of righteous indignation and proper prophetic wrath that lead to action. Pity is a distraction; the soul is divided between it and the action a 'pitiable' state demands. This is seen as Los's division into active male and tearful female, the latter deluding the former." In "The Human Abstract", Blake says: "Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor" (1-2). In his later works, Blake sees Pity as an emotion that can draw beings together.

Often, the word is used alone in speaking to refer to something unfortunate. The full sentence is "It's a pity," but saying the word alone (as in "Pity.") conveys the same idea as the sentence.

Look up pity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Empathy
• Sympathy
• Self-pity