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Quotes About Sympathies

Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had
~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
No, never mind, I didn't think so. Mead, Dante's theme is man-not a man.' Lowell said finally with a mild patience that he reserved only for students. The Italians forever twitch at Dante's sleeves trying to make him say he is of their politics and their way of thinking. Their way indeed! To confine it to Florence or Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante's Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives. Do you boys know of Isaiah 38:10
~ Matthew Pearl
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
~ Willa Cather
The extent to which beliefs are based upon evidence is very much less than believers suppose. Take the kind of action which is most nearly rational: the investment of money by a rich City man. You will often find that his view (say) on the question whether the French franc will go up or down depends upon his political sympathies, and yet is so strongly held that he is prepared to risk money on it.
~ Bertrand Russell
Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.
~ Susan Sontag
My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
According to some estimates, by the early 1930s around a fifth of all Protestant clergy held Nazi sympathies while one in four was a party member. Many showed no hesitation in "worshipping" Hitler in their sermons and prayers. Indeed, a number of German Christians were so fanatically pro-Nazi that they called for Hitler's Mein Kampf to replace the Bible, since it was now "the people's most sacred text; their greatest, purest and truest moral code.
~ Julia Boyd
If Sally had been in an accident or come down with some overtly physical disease, I would not hesitate to tell him about it, confident that his sympathies would flow in my direction as a matter of course. But psychosis defies empathy; few people who have not experienced it up close buy the idea of a behavioral disease. It has the ring of an excuse, a license for self-absorption on the most extreme scale. It suggests that one chooses madness and not the other way around. (86)
~ Michael Greenberg
We must remember, however, that art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies.
~ Kakuz? Okakura
nous laissons à nos sympathies historiques le pas sur notre jugement esthétique. Et ce n'est que lorsqu'il gît tranquillement dans la tombe que nous offrons à un artiste les fleurs de notre approbation.
~ Kakuz? Okakura
Like most Americans, though, I had led that numbingly chaste and uncommitted existence in which one forms neither sympathies nor antipathies of any enduring consequence.
~ Frederick Exley
My mother's sympathies were strongly with the Union. She knew that war was bound to come, but so confident was she in the strength of the Federal Government that she devoutly believed that the struggle could not last longer than six months at the utmost.
~ Buffalo Bill
Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
~ Susan B. Anthony
Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.
~ B. R. Hayden
Listen, as Commander-in-Chief, I grieve for any loss of life. And I stand in -- I send my deepest sympathies to the loved ones who grieve over the loss of a soldier, a loved one. But the cause is a good cause, because we will never forget the lessons of 9/11. This is a part of the war on terror. And the effect of what we have done in Iraq and what we're doing in Iraq will be a very positive effect on future generations of Americans, and that's very important for people to understand.
~ bush george w v
It [Joyce's "Ulysses"] plays on the reader's sympathies to his own undoing unless sleep kindly intervenes and puts a stop to this drain of energy. Arrived at page 135, after making several heroic efforts to get at the book, to "do it justice", as the phrase goes, I fell at last into profound slumber.
~ C.G. Jung
The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
The sympathies of these two men instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained alone. Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful music which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor distinguished his own share from the other's. They led one another, as it were, into a high pavilion of their thoughts, so remote, and hitherto so dim, that they had never entered it before, and so beautiful that they desired to be there always.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
It may be so," said Dr. Clarke, frowning as he spoke; "but I tell you, sir, I could wellnigh doubt the justice of the Heaven above us if no signal humiliation overtake this lady who now treads so haughtily into yonder mansion. She seeks to place herself above the sympathies of our common nature, which envelops all human souls; see if that nature do not assert its claim over her in some mode that shall bring her level with the lowest.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
She seeks to place herself above the sympathies of our common nature, which envelopes all human souls. See if that nature do not assert its claim over her in some mode that shall bring her level with the lowest!
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies.
~ J. A. Froude
Properly speaking, he no longer held opinions; he had sympathies. To which party did he belong? To the party of humanity.
~ Victor Hugo
The spook begins to interfere with the writer's normal mental processes. Sometimes the ghost, by appealing to the writer's sympathies, tempts the writer to imitate him in one way or another. Catherine says that, when I was working on Lovecraft, I even began to dress in the style affected by HPL, like that of a well-bred undertaker.
~ L. Sprague de Camp
This airline is grateful for his extensive contributions and we will miss his friendship and support. We extend our deepest sympathies to the Casey family on its personal loss.
~ Gerard Arpey