Sympathy Quotes

“If you couldn't share someone's pain,, if you didn't have the guts to survive a difficult stretch with them, it was better to choose heartlessness over half-hearted affection.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“Where empathy fails, charity fills.”
― Richie Norton

“I'm heading over to visit Tess for some tea and sympathy."
"I don't like tea," Ollie said. "What's sympathy taste like?"
Natalie laughed and ruffled his hair, then got back in the car. "Like a melted marshmallow with chocolate sauce.”
― Susan Wiggs, The Lost and Found Bookshop

“A long silence filled the room. There was a strong feeling of sadness and deep emotions for her and me. I could not utter a single word after that statement, so I decided to 'be with her' in my silence rather than in my words.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“It will seem absurd to many people, but I have an unbounded sympathy to women of this kind, and I do not think it necessary to apologize for such sympathy. One day, as I was going to the Prefecture for a passport, I saw in one of the neighboring streets a poor girl who was being marched along by two policemen. I do not know what was the matter. All I know is that she was weeping bitterly as she kissed an infant only a few months old, from whom her arrest was to separate her. Since that day I have never dared to despise a woman at first sight.”
― Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias

“Every action is a reaction.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“SAME THING THAT MAKE YOU SMILE MAKE OTHERS CRY”
― prince el fati

“People are born to enrich their own life, not yours. Don't get surprised if they act selfishly.”
― Anupam S Shlok

“But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and of paintings; one great sigh alone would rise to Heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair. As it is, there is always some little distraction—an organ grinder at the corner of the hospital, a shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse, some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar's hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering, and the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled
off for another time.”
― Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill

“Man interests me only since he has ceased to believe in himself. Wile he was in his ascending phase, he deserved no more than indifference. Now he provokes a new sentiment, a special sympathy: compassionate horror.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Experiencing is the only way that leads to the highest degree of knowing or understanding.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Our feelings of sympathy do not embrace all of humanity in equal measure. Some human beings matter to us. We care intensely about their well-being. Others do not matter very much, and still others do not matter at all. This is a hard saying, and may be difficult to accept but it is obviously and undeniably true.”
― David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

“Unless you are spiritually awakened, being happy requires you to ignore or forget other people’s suffering.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“...I could not help but feel moved by the plight of these poor people. Perhaps it was not correct, politically speaking, for me to feel sympathy for them, but my mother would have been one of them if she were alive. She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“All we are, that's all we know.”
― Serena Deena

“He had complicated our task of being pleasant dinner companions by mentioning famine, something that Americans had never known. The word could only conjure otherworldly landscapes of the skeletal dead, which was not the spectral image we wanted to present, for what one should never do was to require other people to imagine they were just like one of us. Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Gradually, as my bruised forehead healed, and as I absorbed my own words, I developed a growing sympathy for the man in these pages, the intelligence operative of doubtful intelligence. Was he a fool or too smart for his own good? Had he chosen the right side or the wrong side of history? And were not these the questions we should all ask ourselves? Or was it only me and myself who should be so concerned?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Don’t attempt to put people in a box that you have not spent some time in yourself. For once you do, you’ll rather quickly come to understand that people weren’t built for boxes. Rather, they were built to break them.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“This journey is arduous for you, me, and everyone around us. But that's how it's meant to be, the journey of life - challenging, strenuous, and nerve-racking. Someday your leg might slip and years of hard work might come undone. Someday you'll run out of motivation to climb. Someday you'll watch your loved ones fall down, forever.
But what if we held each other's hand. Wouldn't the arduous climb become easier for each one of us?”
― Dhruv Kumar, A Scrapyard for Dreams

“And then Billy's mother came back from the ladies' room, sat down on a chair between Billy's and Rosewater's bed. Rosewater greeted her with melodious warmth, asked how she was today. He seemed delighted to hear that she was fine. He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met. He thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in. He called Billy's mother 'dear.' He was experimenting with calling everybody 'dear.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“When being bullied or heckled, refuse to show the emotion the bully wants. Gain the audience’s sympathy by trying to look calm and above it all.”
― Jay Heinrichs, Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion

“Other people's lives were no less impossible to understand than my own.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth: Stories

“If your ears are the only thing that’s listening, you aren’t hearing.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“If anyone is feeling anxious, worried, or maybe you just want a chat, please, please do not come crying to me.”
― Sister Michael

“No matter what level of ability you have, never test a person from his weakest end. Be careful, whether you are crossing the road or the limits.”
― Dr. Khalid Hussain Mir

“In many if not most cases, a psychologist is a glorified and paid shoulder to cry on.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The most unsettling aspect is my tendency to relate to misfortune--not to alleviate it, but to make it mine, to place it in my heart.”
― Manuel Vilas, Ordesa

“People are my agenda. Following that, nothing follows that.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“In our more frustrated moments we turn to people say, “Why don’t you try walking a mile in my shoes!” But the question is, “Which pair and where did I leave them?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Falk realized he felt cheated. He'd left it too long to slay the beast, and over time it had shriveled and wasted until it was no longer a fair fight.”
― Jane Harper, The Dry