Sympathy Quotes

1. "Oh! Do not excite yourself. Shall I say that he interested me because he was trying to grow a mustache and as yet the result is poor." Poirot stroked his own magnificent mustache tenderly. "It is an art," he murmured, "the growing of the mustache! I have sympathy for all who attempt it."
Author: Agatha Christie

2. "I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries."
Author: Alex Ferguson

3. "I've come to warn you, too. It's a dangerous game you're playing. There's a reason the rest of us maintain a distance from Adair, and we've learned our lesson the hard way. But now you've shown him love and that's given him the notion that he is deserving of such devotion. Did you ever think that perhaps the only thing that holds the devil in check is that he knows how despised he his? Even the devil longs for sympathy at times, but sympathy for the devil is fuel for the flame. Your love will embolden him--likely in a way that will bring you regret."
Author: Alma Katsu

4. "She left me, offended at my want of sympathy, and thinking, no doubt, that I envied her. I did not - at least, I firmly believed I did not."
Author: Anne Brontë

5. "I comforted him as well as I could. In such cases men do not need much expression. A grip of the hand, the tightening of an arm over the shoulder, a sob in unison, are expressions of sympathy dear to a man's heart."
Author: Bram Stoker

6. "All of us, whether vivisector or vegan, have been subject to mechanisms undercutting sympathy for animals. How long and to what extent we submit to these mechanisms is not a matter of rationality: to cut off our feelings and support animal exploitation is rational, given societal expectations and sanctions; but to assert our feelings and oppose animal exploitation is also rational, given the pain involved in losing our natural bonds with animals. So our task is not to pass judgment on others' rationality, but to speak honestly of the loneliness and isolation of anthropocentric society, and of the damage done to every person expected to hurt animals."
Author: Brian Luke

7. "Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral."
Author: Charles Darwin

8. "There's a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly."
Author: Charles Duhigg

9. "Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load."
Author: Charles Henry Parkhurst

10. "I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they had nor could have sympathy with anything in me..."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

11. "Someone sent me a letter that had one of the best quotes I've ever read. It said "What is to give light must endure burning." It's by a writer named Viktor Frankl. I've been turning that quote over and over in my head. The truth of it is absolutely awe-inspiring. In the end, I believe it's why we all suffer. It's the meaning we all look for behind the tragedies in our lives. The pain deepens us, burns away our impurities and petty selfishness. It makes us capable of empathy and sympathy. It makes us capable of love. The pain is the fire that allows us to rise from the ashes of what we were, and more fully realize what we can become. When you can step back and see the beauty of the process, it's amazing beyond words."
Author: Damien Echols

12. "They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces. The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted. Frank's odd manner when I spoke about Rebecca. Beatrice and her rather diffident negative attitude. The silence that I had always taken for sympathy and regret was a silence born of shame and embarrassment. It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood. I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth. Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness Maxim would have told these things four months, five months ago."
Author: Daphne Du Maurier

13. "Eric penned nearly a dozen new journal entries in the next two months."I have a goal to destroy as much as possible," he wrote, "so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that."It was a mark of Eric's ruthlessness that he comprehended the pain and consciously fought the urge to spare it. "I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom," [the computer game he played day and night] he wrote. "I have to turn off my feelings."
Author: Dave Cullen

14. "Liberace was certainly master and commander of the ivories ~ he is the only pianist I can watch or listen to without suffering a case of 'Stagefright Sympathy Sickness'."
Author: E.A. Bucchianeri

15. "By firm immutable immortal laws Impress'd on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE,Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strifeOrganic forms, and kindled into life;How Love and Sympathy with potent charmWarm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,And bind Society in golden chains."
Author: Erasmus Darwin

16. "Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience."
Author: Evelyn Underhill

17. "Men are often biased in their judgment on account of their sympathy and their interests."
Author: George William Norris

18. "On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured?disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui?in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable."
Author: Henry Miller

19. "Surely a man must be in a parlours state to excite pity, extremely weak to inspire sympathy, or very evil-looking to make a soul tremble in a den like this, where pain must hold its tongue, poverty remain cheerful, and despair retain its self respect."
Author: Honoré De Balzac

20. "A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism."
Author: Irving Babbitt

21. "Actors who are lovers in real life are often incapable if playing the part of lovers to an audience. It is equally true that sympathy between actors who are not lovers may create a temporary emotion that is perfectly sincere."
Author: Ivor Novello

22. "You can kill the spell of identification just as easily as youcan create it—if you lose the readers' sympathy for the character.You can lose reader sympathy by having your character commitacts of cruelty to another character with whom the readers identifymore strongly or for whom they have strong sympathy. Youcan lose reader sympathy by having the character make dumbchoices—acting at less than maximum capacity. The idiot inthe horror story who responds to creepy noises by going intothe attic armed only with a candle is an example. You can losereader sympathy when a character seems too ordinary, is stereotyped,or doesn't struggle hard enough. The reader wants tocheer a fighter, not witness a milquetoast wallowing in, say, selfpity."
Author: James N. Frey

23. "I nodded with genuine synthetic sympathy."
Author: Jeff Lindsay

24. "You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor."
Author: Joe Hill

25. "Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy."
Author: Joe Hill

26. "Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. Having himself no particular opinions or tastes he relied upon whatever conformed with those of his companion. He was as ready to drink tea at Fortnum's as beer at the Prospect of Whitby; he would listen to military music in St. James's Park or jazz in Compton Street cellar; his voice would tremble with sympathy when he spoke of Sharpeville, or with indignation at the growth of Britain's colored population. To Leamas this observably passive role was repellent; it brought out the bully in him, so that he would lead the other gently into a position where he was committed, and then himself withdraw, so that Ashe was constantly scampering back from some cul-de-sac into which Leamas had enticed him."
Author: John Le Carré

27. "A lot of actors find it impossible not to ask for the audience's sympathy. They have a need to twinkle."
Author: Julian Fellowes

28. "You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them."
Author: Laura Carmichael

29. "I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls."
Author: Lionel Blue

30. "Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting."
Author: Louise Erdrich

31. "...and as a result yet today we are unable to distinguish between sympathy and selfishness."
Author: M.H. Rakib

32. "The process which had begun in her - and in he a little earlier only than it must come to all of us - was the great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world."
Author: Marcel Proust

33. "Who wants tea and sympathy? Let's have coffee and sex, Stacey, eh?"
Author: Margaret Laurence

34. "She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless affection."
Author: Mark Twain

35. "Sympathy compounded of liking and compassion in varying proportions evidently seemed to Jane Austen the most natural inventive to imaginative interest in a character."
Author: Mary Lascelles

36. "I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other."
Author: Mary Shelley

37. "The truth is that at the White House and in Congress, you are as likely to find sympathy for animal issues among Republicans as among Democrats."
Author: Matthew Scully

38. "The more he approached the people and perceived their anger-filled eyes and the dark, tortured fierceness of their expressions, the more his heart stirred, the more his bowels flooded with deep sympathy and love. These are the people, he reflected. They are all brothers, every one of them, but they do not know it—and that is why they suffer. If they knew it, what celebrations there would be, what hugging and kissing, what happiness!"
Author: Nikos Kazantzakis

39. "No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything."
Author: Oscar Wilde

40. "Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

41. "If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone."
Author: Richard Dawkins

42. "We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America...."
Author: Sarah Vowell

43. "... and with my last thought I felt some real sympathy for those poor chickens."
Author: Shannon Hale

44. "Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others..."
Author: Ta Nehisi Coates

45. "He read disappointment at his response and wondered if she realized that she expected a certain amount of effusive sympathy from the people she told. Rejecting that sympathy made her feel strong, compensating for what she perceived as her weakness. He suspected that the disease was the first time she hadn't been able to make everything come out all right through the sheer determination that it would be."
Author: Tanya Huff

46. "The soul of conversation is sympathy"
Author: Thomas Campbell

47. ". Sometimes, but only for a moment, I saw a faint solitaryfigure with a Rosa veiled face, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a dream within adream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew by an understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought,that it was Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman from the beginning of theworld has ever known what love is, or looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities is altogether a spirit,and hides in passions not of his essence if he would commune with a mortal heart. So that if a man love noblyhe knows love through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and if ignobly through vehementjealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable desire; but unveiled love he never knows."
Author: W.B. Yeats

48. "After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge's mercy. […] Shakespeare, it seems to me, was willing to introduce what is an absurd implausibility for the sake of an effect which he could not secure without it: at the last moment when, through his conduct, Shylock has destroyed any sympathy we may have felt for him earlier, we are reminded that, irrespective of his personal character, his status is one of inferiority. A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother."
Author: W.H. Auden

49. "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud."
Author: Walt Whitman

50. "Captain Hale, alone, without sympathy or support, save that from above, on the near approach of death asked for a clergyman to attend him. It was refused. He then requested a Bible; that too was refused by his inhuman jailer."
Author: William Hull

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