What's the difference between pitiful and pitiless?

Pitiful


Definition:

  • (a.) Full of pity; tender-hearted; compassionate; kind; merciful; sympathetic.
  • (a.) Piteous; lamentable; eliciting compassion.
  • (a.) To be pitied for littleness or meanness; miserable; paltry; contemptible; despicable.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The voters don’t do gratitude, self-pitying politicians are wont to moan.
  • (2) With grievous amazement, never self-pitying but sometimes bordering on a sort of numbed wonderment, Levi records the day-to-day personal and social history of the camp, noting not only the fine gradations of his own descent, but the capacity of some prisoners to cut a deal and strike a bargain, while others, destined by their age or character for the gas ovens, follow "the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea".
  • (3) "); hopeless self-pity ("Nobody said anything to me about Billy ... all day long") and rage ("You want to put a bench in the park in Billy's name?
  • (4) Indeed, mainstream economics is a pitifully thin distillation of historical wisdom on the topics that it addresses.
  • (5) Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?” It is there to remind him that the dots are worth fighting for.
  • (6) Last year, Amnesty International described the world’s response as “pitiful” and earlier this week, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants called on the EU to deliver a proper resettlement programme.
  • (7) April's family had to endure the "spectacle of your hypocritical sympathy for their loss and of your tears", the judge told Bridger, saying any tears were motivated purely by self-pity.
  • (8) And this is the mainspring of so many of his stories, novellas, and his one novel, Beware of Pity : the clash between propriety and desire.
  • (9) It’s actually a pity that there’s now a break because I wanted to continue playing games,” said the Italian.
  • (10) In his final fight, against the journeyman boxer Kevin McBride, he was a pitiful figure - slumped in a corner, legs splayed, unable or unwilling to stand himself up.
  • (11) Other negative emotions – self-pity, guilt, apathy, pessimism, narcissism – make it a deeply unattractive illness to be around, one that requires unusual levels of understanding and tolerance from family and friends.
  • (12) He said it was a “pity” that the UK prime minister “wasn’t able to express the British position at the press conference with Donald Trump standing next to her”.
  • (13) As the turbulent commercial radio sector enters another new phase, Park wants to sweep away the thinking that has left too many of his colleagues wallowing in self-pity, and turn his fire on a familiar target.
  • (14) Broadly defined, this sort of behaviour involves procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, obstructionism, self-pity and a tendency to create chaotic situations.
  • (15) It is a pity we did not take our chances,” the Ukraine coach, Mykhailo Fomenko, said.
  • (16) "This depressing morning has now got me questioning my pitiful existence," sobs James Dodge.
  • (17) Foreign dignitaries were invited to attend for the first time and it is a pity that from Europe only Javier Solana chose to take the offer up.
  • (18) Men convicted of rape are often pitied in the media and, like Evans, quickly vault back to positions of fame .
  • (19) But after the strange denials that this old, sick man is dying I want to talk not with pity but of his power.
  • (20) Staff here dread the welfare reform bill, waiting for debts, arrears, evictions and pitiful hardship to wash up on their doorstep.

Pitiless


Definition:

  • (a.) Destitute of pity; hard-hearted; merciless; as, a pitilessmaster; pitiless elements.
  • (a.) Exciting no pity; as, a pitiless condition.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They fit with his continuation of the regime’s systemic human rights abuses, its pitiless prison labour camp system including enslavement, forced abortions and systemic rape, its abductions and foreign hostage-taking, and its aggressive defiance of its neighbours.
  • (2) The judge began sentencing for the "sickening and pitiless" attack by saying that Adebolajo and Adebowale were converts to Islam who became radicalised and extremists.
  • (3) A grand and sombre staircase - dark, looming, pitiless - leads up from the Axes to the exhibits, allowing Libeskind to play one last trick on the visitor by luring him up a final flight that goes nowhere, before his voice gives way to the memoranda of Jewish history.
  • (4) As Bellfield refused to come to the court from his prison cell, judge Mr Justice Wilkie described him as a "cruel and pitiless killer" who had "not had the courage to come into court to face his victims and receive his sentence".
  • (5) The pitiless tone of social media has made this sort of exercise even harder to manage than before.
  • (6) Levi Bellfield refused to leave his prison cell to hear Mr Justice Wilkie sentence him to life without parole and condemn him as a "cruel and pitiless killer".
  • (7) She’s pitiless with him, even with the polite hat doffing on managing the global financial crisis and projecting Australian interests through the G20.
  • (8) How does she survive on a pittance in that pitiless pandemonium?
  • (9) Your sickening and pitiless conduct was in stark contrast to the compassion and bravery shown by the various women at the scene who tended to Lee Rigby's body and who challenged what you had done and said.
  • (10) He added: "He is marked out as a cruel and pitiless killer."
  • (11) These stories are cut-glass beauties, pitiless and hard-edged and constantly poking fun at the pretensions of the middle and upper classes.
  • (12) Earlier the judge who sentenced "cruel and pitiless" Bellfield to life for her murder and kidnap dismissed the jury, which was still deliberating on allegations that Bellfield had tried to abduct another girl, Rachel Cowles, then 11, the day before Milly vanished.
  • (13) The most recent synopsis for The Hateful Eight suggests the film “follows the steadily ratcheting tension that develops after a blizzard diverts a stagecoach from its route, and traps a pitiless and mistrustful group which includes a competing pair of bounty hunters, a renegade Confederate soldier, and a female prisoner in a saloon in the middle of nowhere”.
  • (14) To suffer the humility of failing courage in face of pitiless terror.
  • (15) In the article, for French magazine L’Obs, the correspondent suggested China’s “pitiless repression” of the Uighurs was to blame for a tide of deadly violence around the country, including bomb and knife attacks on civilians.
  • (16) The towering historian of the left EP Thompson agreed with him, and conjured a pitiless elite of aristocratic Whigs, unrelenting in the exhibition of authority.
  • (17) A brilliantly learned man with a pitiless mind and a kind eye.
  • (18) Pallas Athena, the Greek god of wisdom, becomes, in Klimt's painting of her, a shining warrior with pitiless eyes: wisdom frozen into dogma.
  • (19) "Everywhere the same hard, grim, pitiless sign of battle and war.
  • (20) The environment of a group such as Islamic State, created around a cult of extreme violence and a worldview that dehumanises all outside the organisation, can quickly turn an individual from a misguided insurgent into a pitiless terrorist killer, more than happy to execute a defenceless hostage with a knife, on camera.

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