Quotes About Sympathy

Sympathy is a form of fear, above the vulgar conception of time.

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.

Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks.

He was genuinely sorry for Yossarian; when Yossarian realized that, he was genuinely sorry for Rogoff.

Mrs. Daneeka, Doc Daneeka's wife, was not glad that Doc Daneeka was gone and split the peaceful Staten Island night with woeful shrieks of lamentation when she learned by War Department telegram that her husband had been killed in action. Women came to comfort her, and their husbands paid condolence calls and hoped inwardly that she would soon move to another neighborhood and spare them the obligation of continuous sympathy.

I have drawn from books written by learned experts and also upon my observation of living creatures in whom I have long delighted and with whom I have perhaps more sympathy than some of those who remain austerely scientific. The intuitions of a lover are not always to be trusted; but neither are those of the loveless.

The inclination to exchange thoughts with one another is probably an original impulse of our nature. If I be in pain I wish to let you know it, and to ask your sympathy and assistance; and my pleasurable emotions also, I wish to communicate to, and share with you. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, February 11, 1859

you cried, they tried to comfort you. But if you were stony faced they let you alone.

When a man shares with a woman his marital/domestic problems, the kind of problems that seem never to be solved but only to morph into yet more complicated problems, like hair snarls proliferating, sympathy flows in one direction only. By instinct a woman knows it's naive to expect the flow to reverse.

Yet, as a sympathetic biographer, shall I suggest, this outspoken young woman is not so innocent as she imagines herself?

What saved us from becoming hard-nosed or callous was that we really liked each other, while remaining totally mystified by each other.

Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.

La experiencia, eso que llamamos experiencia, no es el inventario de nuestros dolores, sino la simpatía aprendida hacia los dolores ajenos.

How are babies made? Visibly startled, Jordan turned and opened his mouth, as if he intended to speak, but for some reason no words came out. At first Alexandra was puzzled by his involuntary silence, but then understanding dawned. She shook her head and sighed with sympathy for their mutual plight. You don't know either, do you?

Actually I am pretty pregnant with the news Sid brought me, but glad we have not spread it. The girls look very happy. With their heads bound up in babushkas they might be out of the peasant chorus of a Russian opera. Any minute now we will sing and dance to the balalaika. Charity is tall and striking; Sally smaller, darker, quieter. One dazzles, the other warms. In a couple of hours I will need sympathy, but for now I like being washed by the wind.

But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life. With me it was always to be done in words; Sid too, though with less confidence. With Sally it was sympathy, human understanding, a tenderness toward human cussedness or frailty. And with Charity it was organization, order, action, assistance to the uncertain, and direction to the wavering.

The American girls, undaunted, maintained their natural warmth, and in their unrivalled sympathy there appeared genuine maternal feelings that did not alter for national differences, but that was feeble consolation in this profound sadness over the fact that "being a human being among other human beings" only ever happens in dreams of a perfect world.

He explained what he saw in her eyes, which was not sadness or disappointment but understanding. Sympathy, he said, and wit. At some level sympathy implied knowledge and knowledge had a melancholy aspect. He believed that was universally true, no exceptions. When you knew too much you felt a natural distress but that was something quite different from fundamental personal sadness, sadness as a trait, like blue eyes. Her distress was not temperamental but intellectual.

the relationships in art are not necessarily ones of outward form, but are founded on inner sympathy of meaning.

Only the single word "innocent" ("without wrongdoing" [1.137.7]) suggests the slightest sympathy for the murdered Nishadas. They are sacrificial substitutes, whom the author of this text treats as expendable because he regards them as subhuman beings.

Seeing Henry cry made Max start crying. Then the Candymaker joined in. That did it; Logan was done for. They all huddled together and sobbed and beamed at each other and laughed and sobbed some more.

Happiness is when someone laughs with you and doesn't laugh at you.

I crouch beside her bed and stumble through the only prayer I know: now I lay me down to sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep. It's a appropriate, I think. And still I feel worthless. I want to comfort her, to chase her fears into the snow. But sympathy is buried in me, like a stone in the belly of a goat. And the goat is the rare animal that will eat garbage. I hold her hand until she falls asleep, then steal fifty dollars from her purse.

sympathy we would feel for the patient would not be under our control; it would arise from System 1.