Quotes About Sympathy

Being myself no stranger to grief, I am learning to help the unhappy

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

You're the only person I've ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.

His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.

To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.

Have I never understood you, Katherine? Have I been very selfish?' 'Yes ... You've asked her for sympathy, and she's not sympathetic; you've wanted her to be practical, and she's not practical.

But we have other lives, I think, I hope,' she murmured. 'We live in others, … We live in things.

So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.

Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?

George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist....But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears.

How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.

Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing––poor women waiting to see the Queen go past––poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War––tut tut––actually had tears in his eyes.

Who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him?

Non era stato necessario che parlassero. Avevano pensato le stesse cose e lui aveva risposto senza che lei dovesse chiedere nulla. Era là in piedi e stendeva le mani su tutta la debolezza e la sofferenza dell'umanità; le parve che esaminasse, con tolleranza e compassione, il loro destino finale.

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable

after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure (...)

there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it...

She groped for words. I supplied them mentally. (He broke my heart. You merely broke my life).

She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.

When peoples cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

Selfish. Solitary. Savage. Those were the things that best defined him. Not softness. Not sympathy. Not some twisted urge to be a saviour to the fierce-hearted beauty and the innocent child sleeping so trustingly under the guard of a man who'd been raised a soulless monster.

It seems the misfortune of one can plow a deeper furrow in the heart than the misfortune of millions.