The pathetic fallacy is the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations. The word 'pathetic' in this use is related to 'pathos' or 'empathy' (capability of feeling), and is not pejorative. In the discussion of literature, the pathetic fallacy is similar to personification.
Read more about Pathetic Fallacy: History, In Legend, In Literature and Popular Culture, In Science
Famous quotes containing the words pathetic fallacy, pathetic and/or fallacy:
“All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the “pathetic fallacy.””
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“The earth had a single light afar,
A flickering, human pathetic light,
That was maintained against the night,
It seemed to me, by the people there,
With a Godforsaken brute despair.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called “scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)