Sympathy Quotes

“Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“As for God, I frankly admit that I find it easier to live with the age-old questions about suffering than with many of the easy or pious explanations offered from time to time. Some of which seem to verge on blasphemy. I hope so much that no one has sought to try and comfort you by saying that God must have needed Francesca more than you. I would find it impossible to worship a God who deliberately stole my child from me. Such a God would be a moral monster.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, Winter Solstice

“Although he takes pleasure in seeing her look good, he feels a special sympathy with her when she looks ill or her skin is bad, like when someone who’s usually very good at sports has a poor game. It makes her seem nicer somehow.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn't mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one's own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling compassion with myself.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“[January 1944]As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.
Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereasyouare the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive!”
― Arthur Koestler

“I think that's quite true. and in fact the people who understand this the best are those who are carrying out the control and domination in the more free societies. like the U.S. and England, where popular struggles have have won a lot of freedoms over the years and the state has limited capacity to coerce. It is very striking that it's precisely in those societies that elite groups—the business world, state managers and so on—recognized early on that they are going to have to develop massive methods of control of attitude and opinion, because you cannot control people by force anymore and therefore you have to modify their consciousness so that they don't perceive that they are living under conditions of alienation, oppression, subordination and so on. In fact, that's what probably a couple trillion dollars are spent on each year in the U.S., very self-consciously, from the framing of television advertisements for two-year olds to what you are taught in graduate school economics programs. It's designed to create a consciousness of subordination and it's also intended specifically and pretty consciously to suppress normal human emotions.

Normal human emotions are sympathy and solidarity, not just for people but for stranded dolphins. It's just a normal reaction for people. If you go back to the classical political economists, people like Adam Smith, this was just taken for granted as the core of human nature and society. One of the main concentrations of advertising and education is to drive that out of your mind. And it's very conscious. In fact, it's conscious in social policy right in front of our eyes today. Take the effort to destroy Social Security. Well, what's the point of that? There's a lot of scam about financial problems, which is all total nonsense. And, of course, they want Wall Street to make a killing. Underlying it all is something much deeper. Social Security is based on a human emotion and it's a natural human emotion which has to be driven out of people minds, namely the emotion that you care about other people. You care. It's a social and community responsibility to care whether a disabled widow across town has enough food to eat, or whether a kid across the street can go to school. You have to get that out of people's heads. You have to make them say, "Look, you are a personal, rational wealth maximizer. If that disabled widow didn't prepare for her own future, it's her problem not your problem. It's not your fault she doesn't have enough to eat so why should you care?”
― Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism

“My love will be complete at the point I realize that my love will never be complete.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Feeling sorry for our bodies ought to be the closest we get to feeling sorry for ourselves.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Compassion, kindness, empathy, sympathy, mercy, and understanding are six connected values that ‎should be implanted in the young generation, as they are what motivates people to help and stand ‎for each other. A heart that is filled with mercifulness is a heart that will help its society and the whole ‎world to continue, improve, and thrive.‎”
― Noora Ahmed Alsuwaidi

“Experiencing terrible pain opens our hearts and minds to express compassion for other people and communion with ourselves.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“She had inhibited her sympathy, one genuine sympathetic impulse would have ruined her.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“You got that right, buddy," Paddy thought, but what Frost saw was a man nodding his dead in a knowing and sympathetic way. Paddy had learned the trick from a funeral parlor director in Brooklyn.”
― Marc Grossberg, The Best People: A Tale of Trials and Errors

“They'd smother what was left of her pride in well-meaning sympathy.”
― Kit Rocha, Beyond Pain

“I even felt a touch of sympathy for the difficulties he had faced in his life, however stupid and repulsive the shape of that life might appear to me.”
― Haruki Murakami

“Love includes in it sympathy, but sympathy may not love.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“While a person can accept that seemingly impenetrable obstacles blocked other people’s path, each of us hurt in an exclusive manner, rendering us colorblind to the elongated bands of hard times that loom over other people’s promising zodiacs.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A child is not born with affection, adoration, and kindheartedness. A person accrues empathy and sympathy from experiencing our own pain.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Our nearness to our problems makes them seem way bigger than they are, while our farness from other people’s problems makes them seem way smaller than they are.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“All those other gestures of sympathy seemed a little melodramatic to me. My loss was mine and only mine. For the others, it was just a matter of words.”
― Benyamin, Jasmine Days

“Living beings must take into account both human savagery and human congeniality. The stupendous irrationality and meanness that underlies much of human behavior contrasted with the love and compassion that people unselfishly exhibit makes ordinary life both appalling and fascinating. Using all available knowledge, we must grope our way through the bizarre twilight zone cast while living amongst the great apes, an unpredictable species that is capable of displaying both immense charity and engaging in the most outrageously inhuman actions imaginable. The blessed oddity of human behavior prompts an immense swath of tolerance and produces a wellspring of sympathy for our fellow humans. The radiant minds of history’s great thinkers infused with the quick of experience of today’s perceptive students of life will assist light a pathway though the byzantine jungle for the preeminent torch bearers of tomorrow to claw through. Our collective and interweaved journey through this wrinkle of time shall produce the backdrop of the story of the next generation, a unique tale paying tribute to these thunderous times.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Moral growth corresponds with people’s ability to see the world from an ever-increasing number of perspectives and act accordingly.”
― Gudjon Bergmann, Co-Human Harmony: Using Our Shared Humanity to Bridge Divides

“We like to believe ourselves sympathetic, but, in truth, Nature has designed us, perhaps necessarily, to be callous. A murder in Newcastle is of less importance than a cut finger in our own home, and therefore Winifred Mostyn was only mildly interested. All at once, however, the mildness evaporated. In the next column a name had caught her eye.”
― J. Jefferson Farjeon, The Z Murders

“You can't give love and nor you can demand it. If it goes, to anyone, you have no more control, if you can control, it is not love, but just sympathy.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Wearing another’s skin is the most effective way to learn sympathy.”
― A G Howard

“Words of sympathy and love for broken heart people show and appear the feelings of your moral greatness and humanity.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Listen with a heart, but answer with a soul.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“You must treat an evil-doer in the same spirit as a doctor treats a patient and develop sympathy for him. It is better to maintain distance from unhealthy people and protect yourself rather than become intimate with them and later curse them for infecting you with their viruses.”
― Awdhesh Singh, 31 Ways to Happiness

“I love men. Rather, I love little parts of their bodies, not the perfect parts, but rather their odd features and their unique traits that make of them stand out of this cookie cutter world we live in. Throw a name at me, and I can instantly tell you which feature makes my heart go thumpedy-thump. Cropper Rowe: lucious, mocha brown-colored mole on the back of his neck. Derek: long yet narrow sideburns. Thorsten: thick nose, which he broke skiing. Milo: jet black hair, slicked back to reveal forehead and a small dimple. Vincent: lower jawline as it curves up to his ears and the way his stubble grows on it. Thayer: his waist and how he wears his jeans low enough to expose his appendectomy scar. And I love Eugene's eyes. Not that they are clear blue, but that they have a kind shape. It sounds cliché, but they are soft, and when I look into them, I feel I've known him forever. The sadness still lingers deep inside them, but he smiles a lot. Maybe I'm mistaken and life has been kind to him. Maybe he's the positive kind of fellow for whom smiling comes easily, despite it all.”
― Marion Raby, Life Is Fair: a novel

“No one has ever been saved from drowning by sympathy.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci