Sympathize Quotes

1. "Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other."
Author: Albert Pike

2. "This paper will serve instead of a confidential friend into whose ear I might pour forth the overflowings of my heart. It will not sympathize with my distresses, but then, it will not laugh at them, and, if I keep it close, it cannot tell again; so it is, perhaps, the best friend I could have for the purpose."
Author: Anne Brontë

3. "You know, Grace, it's queer but I don't feel narrow. I feel broad. How can I explain it to you, so you would understand? I've seen everything...and I've hardly been away from this yard....I've been part of the beginning and part of the growth. I've married...and borne children and looked into the face of death. Is childbirth narrow, Grace? Or marriage? Or death? When you've experienced all those things, Grace, the spirit has traveled although the body has been confined. I think travel is a rare privilege and I'm glad you can have it. But not every one who stays at home is narrow and not every one who travels is broad. I think if you can understand humanity...can sympathize with every creature...can put yourself into the personality of every one...you're not narrow...you're broad."
Author: Bess Streeter Aldrich

4. "So I'm over there in England, you know, trying to get news about the [L.A.] riots... and all these Brit people are trying to sympathize with me... 'Oh Bill, crime is horrible. Bill, if it's any consolation crime is horrible here, too.' ...Shutup. This is Hobbitown and I am Bilbo Hicks, Okay? This is a land of fairies and elves. You do not have crime like we have crime, but I appreciate you trying to be, you know, Diplomatic. You gotta see English crime. It's hilarious, you don't know if you're reading the front page or the comic section over there. I swear to God. I read an article - front page of the paper - one day, in England: 'Yesterday, some Hooligans knocked over a dustbin in Shafsbry.' Wooooo... 'The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! What if they become roughians? I would hate to be a dustbin in Shafsbry tonight."
Author: Bill Hicks

5. "They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known. And I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lovers eyes...and I can only stand apart and sympathize...for we are only what our situations hand us...it's either sadness or euphoria..."
Author: Billy Joel

6. "I once saw a spindly man carrying a stone larger than his head upon his back, the passage went. He stumbled beneath the weight, shirtless under the sun, wearing only a loincloth. He tottered down a busy thoroughfare. People made way for him. Not because they sympathized with him, but because they feared the momentum of his steps. You dare not impede one such as this. The monarch is like this man, stumbling along, the weight of a kingdom on his shoulders. Many give way before him, but so few are willing to step in and help carry the stone. They do not wish to attach themselves to the work, lest they condemn themselves to a life full of extra burdens."
Author: Brandon Sanderson

7. "Come out into the world about you, be it either wide or limited. Sympathize, not in thought only, but in action, with all about you. Make yourself known and felt for something that would be loved and missed, in twenty thousand little ways, if you were to die; then your life will be a happy one, believe me."
Author: Charles Dickens

8. "When I was a schoolboy in England, the old bound volumes of Kipling in the library had gilt swastikas embossed on their covers. The symbol's 'hooks' were left-handed, as opposed to the right-handed ones of the Nazi hakenkreuz, but for a boy growing up after 1945 the shock of encountering the emblem at all was a memorable one. I later learned that in the mid-1930s Kipling had caused this 'signature' to be removed from all his future editions. Having initially sympathized with some of the early European fascist movements, he wanted to express his repudiation of Hitlerism (or 'the Hun,' as he would perhaps have preferred to say), and wanted no part in tainting the ancient Indian rune by association. In its origin it is a Hindu and Jainas symbol for light, and well worth rescuing."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

9. "That first week, I also went to Washington. That was really tough. I sympathize with those Washington figures who have to face 40 Times Washington bureau reporters. They ask hard questions and they're relentless. And they were quite suspicious and quite dubious about me."
Author: Daniel Okrent

10. "You made a mistake, and sadly, time travel has not yet been invented, so just move on because time does not sympathize with anybody."
Author: Dave Guerrero

11. "I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it."
Author: David Eddings

12. "People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching."
Author: David Mitchell

13. "It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear."
Author: E.M. Forster

14. "Weakness ever sympathizes with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers are there."
Author: Éliphas Lévi

15. "Margaret found that the indifferent, careless conversations of one who, however kind, was not too warm and anxious a sympathizer, did her good."
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

16. "Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances, which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

17. "Jeb dragged a protesting Anita toward a rapidly approaching sheriff'sfour-wheel drive. Blood dribbled through her fingers covering a gunshotwound on her arm. "Lady, I've never raised a hand to a woman in my life,but you are sorely testing my limits."Chloe sympathized. If there was one thing she hated it was acondescending psycho bitch with bad taste in sweaters."
Author: Fiona Archer

18. "What are blue-stockings?' asked Tommy.Naturally you don't know,' replied the other. 'If you did, you would sympathize more with Bluebeard. They were ladies who were always reading books. They even read them aloud."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

19. "To me, animals have all the traits indicative of soul. For soul is not something we can see or measure...No one can prove that animals have souls. Asking for proof would be like demanding proof that I love my wife and children, or wanting me to prove that Handel's Messiah is a glorious masterpiece of music. Some truths simply cannot be demonstrated. But if we open our hearts to other creatures and allow ourselves to sympathize with their joys and struggles, we will find they have the power to touch and transform us. There is an inwardness in other creatures that awakens what is innermost in ourselves."
Author: Gary Kowalski

20. "They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

21. "The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia."
Author: Hideki Tojo

22. "We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer."
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

23. "Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peoples' places. Of course, this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. One might use such a power to manipulate or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages. They can close their hearts and minds to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think that they have any fewer nightmares than I do."
Author: J.K. Rowling

24. "They went to the sands, to watch the flowing of the tide, which a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in all the grandeur which so flat a shore admitted. They praised the morning; gloried in the sea; sympathized in the delight of the fresh-feeling breeze- and were silent..."
Author: Jane Austen

25. "He had glimpsed a glorious ideal, had struggled towards it and seized it and come to understand it, and was disappointed. One could sympathize."
Author: John Gardner

26. "To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on.If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful--"
Author: John Gardner

27. "No fiction can have real interest if the central character is not an agent struggling for his or her own goals but a victim, subject to the will of others. (Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners.) We care how things turn out because the character cares, our interest comes from empathy, and though we may know more than the character knows, anticipating dangers the character cannot see, we understand and to some degree sympathize with the character's desire, approving what the character approves."
Author: John Gardner

28. "I sympathize far more with heavier people than I ever will with thin. I'll never be thin. Let's be honest."
Author: Kevin Smith

29. "I am not a Kant expert and no Kantian but, I should say, a Kant sympathizer—especially where conflicts between Kantian and so-called historicist thinking are concerned, both in epistemology and in ethics."
Author: Leszek Kołakowski

30. "It's true I've never been pregnant, but I know it's like to lose the possibility of a baby. So of course I sympathize with Elizabeth, Phil! Deeply! My heart breaks for her. I've cried and cried for her each time she's lost another baby.It's just that sometimes I want to say to her, "Darling, maybe you don't get to be a mother, but you still get to be a wife."
Author: Liane Moriarty

31. "The way you treat me babyCheat and tell me liesI guess I shouldn't care at allBut still I sympathize'cause you got heart troubleComing onYeah you got heart trouble coming onWell you think that you don't need me babyBut you're gonna miss me when I'm gone"
Author: Martina Mcbride

32. "She disapproved, but part of her seemed secretly to sympathize with the sickness. It was like she thought everybody had it, and the best you could do was to cover it up, and sometimes it would just come boiling out anyway. Then you had to point at it and condemn it, even though you knew you had it too."
Author: Mary Gaitskill

33. "As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind, I was dependent on none, and related to none . . . and there was none to lament my annihilation . . . what did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them."
Author: Mary Shelley

34. "I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine... gentle yet corageous, possesed, as a cultivated as well as a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own to aprove or amend my plans."
Author: Mary Shelley

35. "So much of translating, Gil once told me, takes place in an imaginary space where the writer and the translator come together. It is not necessary to sympathize with the writer, to agree with what he's written. But it is necessary to walk alongside and stay in step. It's harder, he says, when the other person has a bad limp or stops and starts all the time or moves erratically. It is hardest of all when the story comes from a place the translator himself can't go."
Author: Meg Rosoff

36. "I'm manipulating the audience. I'm making sure people sympathize."
Author: Melinda Clarke

37. "First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life."
Author: Milan Kundera

38. "In languages that derive from Latin "compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer"
Author: Milan Kundera

39. "Poor Christopher-John had fallen into the hands of Miss. Daisy Crocker. I greatly sympathized him, but as in everything else, Christopher John tried to see the bright side in having to face such a shrew every morning. "Maybe she done changed," he said hopefully on the first day of school. However, when classes were over he was noticeably quiet. Well?" I asked him. He shrugged dejectedly and admitted, "She still the same."
Author: Mildred D. Taylor

40. "Ethan had told the world, the world sympathized, and Sarah Lemon was now and forever (because wasn't cyberspace instantly forever?) someone you had to be 'nice' to, a pathetic girl who just didn't get it, the scourge of her generation, the lowest rung on the ladder, a loser."
Author: Mitch Albom

41. "When you read a holy book, you emphasize that God exists.When you see people, you sympathize their existence."
Author: Mustafa SULTAN

42. "The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence."
Author: Nicole Krauss

43. "Never sympathize with the thing that is stabbing God all the time. God has to hurt the thing that must go."
Author: Oswald Chambers

44. "{Letter from Debbs to Eva Ingersoll, husband of Robert Ingersoll, just after the news of Robert's death}We were inexpressibly shocked to hear of the sudden death of your dear husband and our best loved friend. Most tenderly do we sympathize with you, and all of yours in your great bereavement... Gifted with the rarest genius, in beautiful alliance with his heroism, his kindness and boundless love, he made the name of Ingersoll immortal.To me, he was an older brother and as I loved him living, so will I cherish his sweet memory forever."
Author: Robert Ingersoll

45. "Women have bitchfests when their men do something stupid. They get together to dicuss us, compare notes and sympathize. She has to have enough chocolate to share"
Author: Robin Kaye

46. "I always sympathized with the people who did work for hire; I was one of them."
Author: Stan Lee

47. "I'm a registered Independent. But my brother says it's obvious that I'm a Republican sympathizer. Once I get in the voting booth, it doesn't matter."
Author: Stephen Baldwin

48. "This World will always continue to be a mixture of Good and Evil. Our duty is to sympathize with the weak and to Love even the wrongdoer."
Author: Swami Vivekananda

49. "I want to sympathize, I do, but the love triangle is just too delicious. The determined rock star and the possessive billionaire. Rawr."
Author: Sylvia Day

50. "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata(Give, sympathize, control)"
Author: T.S. Eliot

Sympathize Quotes Pictures