“Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses…" by Dorothy Parker?
Dorothy Parker photo
Dorothy Parker 172
American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist 1893–1967

Related quotes

Haruki Murakami photo
Dugald Stewart photo
Françoise Sagan photo
Louis Riel photo
James Salter photo

“I have never been able to write the story. I reach a certain point and cannot go on. The death of kings can be recited, but not of one’s child.”

James Salter (1925–2015) American novelist and short-story writer

Burning the Days (1997 memoir)

Lang Lang photo

“I started lessons when I was three and a half. In the beginning I just played a little but, when I was five, I played my first recital, and from that point my parents had high hopes for me; especially my father.”

Lang Lang (1982) Chinese pianist

theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/may/14/lang-lang-piano-china-father.

Charles Sanders Peirce photo

“Feelings, by being excited, become more easily excited, especially in the ways in which they have previously been excited. The consciousness of such a habit constitutes a general conception.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Architecture of Theories (1891)
Context: The one primary and fundamental law of mental action consists in a tendency to generalisation. Feeling tends to spread; connections between feelings awaken feelings; neighboring feelings become assimilated; ideas are apt to reproduce themselves. These are so many formulations of the one law of the growth of mind. When a disturbance of feeling takes place, we have a consciousness of gain, the gain of experience; and a new disturbance will be apt to assimilate itself to the one that preceded it. Feelings, by being excited, become more easily excited, especially in the ways in which they have previously been excited. The consciousness of such a habit constitutes a general conception.
The cloudiness of psychological notions may be corrected by connecting them with physiological conceptions. Feeling may be supposed to exist, wherever a nerve-cell is in an excited condition. The disturbance of feeling, or sense of reaction, accompanies the transmission of disturbance between nerve-cells or from a nerve-cell to a muscle-cell or the external stimulation of a nerve-cell. General conceptions arise upon the formation of habits in the nerve-matter, which are molecular changes consequent upon its activity and probably connected with its nutrition.

Related topics