Noun

apathy (usually uncountable; plural apathies)

1. Complete lack of emotion or motivation about a person, activity, or object; depression; lack of interest or enthusiasm; disinterest.

Derived terms

• apathetic

Related terms

• apatheia

Apathy (also called impassivity or perfunctoriness) is a state of indifference, or the suppression of emotions such as concern, excitement, motivation and passion. An apathetic individual has an absence of interest or concern to emotional, social, or physical life. They may also exhibit an insensibility or sluggishness. The opposite of apathy is flow. In positive psychology, apathy is described as a response to an easy challenge for which the subject has matched skills.

Often, apathy has been felt after witnessing horrific acts, such as the killing or maiming of people during a war. It is also known to be associated with many conditions, some of which are: depression, Alzheimer's disease, Chagas' disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, dementia, Korsakoff's Syndrome, excessive vitamin D, Hypothyroidism, general fatigue, Huntington's disease, Pick's disease, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), schizophrenia, Schizoid Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and others. Some medications and the heavy use of drugs such as heroin may bring apathy as a side effect.

This page is for quotes on the subject of Apathy.

Quotes

Organized alphabetically by author.

• I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate — it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.
  • Leo Buscaglia

• Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all — the apathy of human beings.
  • Helen Keller

• Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
  • Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms (1764-99)

• Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it's going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is.
  • Victoria Safford in "The Small Work in the Great Work" in The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (2004) by Paul Rogat Loeb

• Indifference, if let alone, will produce obduracy; and obduracy, if let alone, will produce torment.
  • Henry Melvill, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 344.

• Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
  • George Jean Nathan

• There are few signs in a soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true— the real meaning of which is, that all religions are equally false.
  • Frederick William Robertson, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 344.

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Wed Sep 1 08:36:33 2010