Quotes About Sympathy

But no one will understand Oscar Wilde who for a moment loses sight of the fact that he was a pagan born: as Gautier says, "One for whom the visible world alone exists," endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of sympathy with Christianity, one of "the Confraternity of the faithless who "cannot" believe," (His own words in "De Profundis.") to whom a sense of sin and repentance are symptoms of weakness and disease.

Even a witch wants sympathy.

Poor Petey. I'd like to say I could almost feel a tender spot for poor Petey, but the truth is I'd rather feel at the tender spot on his head and give it a poke.

That's another thing about the emotions: they make us take sides.

Language-trained apes often give the impression that they regard themselves as almost human, such as when, while sorting pictures of humans from those of other animals, they put their own portrait on the human pile. They obviously sympathize with the people that surround them: they want to fit in, and to be like them.

The object of empathy is understanding. The object of sympathy is the other person's well-being." Whether based on empathy or not, animal succorance is the functional equivalent of human sympathy, expected only in species that know strong attachment. I am not speaking here of anonymous aggregations of fish or butterflies, but the individualized bonding, affection, and fellowship of many mammals and birds.

Whereas sympathy is by definition positive, empathy doesn't need to be, especially if the capacity to understand others is turned against them.

Estoy seguro de que solidarizaba. Sobre todo cuando yo lloraba. No sabía que mis lágrimas eran de rabia, no de pena.

I put in, in all, 15 years among the Sioux, Assiniboines and Mountain Crows. I'm not going into the subject, but I will say that the more I saw of the relations of the white man and the Indian, the more sympathy I had for the Indians. pg 62

Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.

No one but a woman can help a man when he is in trouble of the heart.

Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.

Pity can be a powerful tool. Anytime you can make someone else feel something, you've got power over them.

My business is trying to arouse human pity. There are few things that'll move people to pity, a few, but the trouble is when they've been used several times, they no longer work. So it happens, for instance, that a man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time that he'll give him sixpence. But the second time it'll only be a threepenny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he'll hand him over cold-bloodedly to the police.

I see with sympathy The swollen veins on his brow, showing How exhausting it is to be evil.

Empathy is not relating to an experience, it's connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience.

Empathy heals shame; sympathy exacerbates shame. We don't want people to feel sorry for us; we want people to be with us.

empathy is connecting to the feeling under the experience, not the experience itself.

Again, the difference between empathy and sympathy: feeling with and feeling for. The empathic response: I get it, I feel with you, and I've been there. The sympathetic response: I feel sorry for you.

Empathy is not connecting to an experience, it's connecting to the emotions that underpin an experience.

Like all sympathy, it said, "I'm over here and you're over there. I'm sorry for you and I'm sad for you. AND, while I'm sorry that happened to you, let's be clear: I'm over here." This is not compassion.

Me too" says I may not have had the exact same experience as you, but I know this struggle, and you are not alone. Sympathy says Wow, that's bad, I feel so sorry for you. I don't know or understand what your experience is like, but I'll grant you that it looks pretty bad and I don't want to know.

Rather than being a tool for connection, sympathy emerged in the data as a form of disconnection. Sympathy is removed: When someone says, "I feel sorry for you" or "That must be terrible," they are standing at a safe distance. Rather than conveying the powerful "me too" of empathy, it communicates "not me," and then adds, "But I do feel for you." Sympathy is more likely to be a shame trigger than something that heals shame.

The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.