Quotes about sympathy

Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength, not my weakness.

— Amos Bronson Alcott

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

One cannot weep for the entire world, it is beyond human strength. One must choose.

— Jean Anouilh

The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.

— Nicholson Baker

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.

— Catharine Esther Beecher

Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?

— William Blake

Those who would make us feel, must feel themselves.

— Randolph Churchill

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The people that I care about are the people out there on the street. I can identify with them.

— Princess of Wales Diana

Sympathy is never wasted except when you give it to yourself.

— John W. Draper

Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

— George Eliot

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Seldom in the business and transactions of ordinary life, do we find the sympathy we want.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.

— B. R. Hayden

Sympathizing and selfish people are alike, both given to tears.

— Leigh Hunt

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

— Mother Teresa

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

— Florence Nightingale

Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.

— Charles H. Parkhurst

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

— Pablo Picasso

No man needs sympathy because he has to work. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

— Theodore Roosevelt

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.

— George Santayana

The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.

— Simone Weil

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

— Walt Whitman

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the color, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

— Oscar Wilde

Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.

— Oscar Wilde