Sympathy Quotes


If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.
– Moliere

Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.
– Harriet Beecher Stowe
I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.
– Joseph Addison
Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.
– Henri Frederic Amiel
Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine.
– Saint Thomas Aquinas
What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
– Saint Augustine
I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one.
– Aneurin Bevan
Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.
– William Blake
Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
– Robert Browning
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
– Agatha Christie
It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
One often calms one's grief by recounting it.
– Pierre Corneille
We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.
– Davy Crockett
Teetotallers lack the sympathy and generosity of men that drink.
– William Henry Davies
Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.
– Benjamin Disraeli
Grief is the price we pay for love.
– Elizabeth II
Sympathy is something that shouldn't be bestowed upon the Yankees. Apparently it angers them.
– Bob Feller
The more sympathy you give, the less you need.
– Malcolm Forbes
Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
– Edward Gibbon
Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.
– Jean Giraudoux
There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.
– William E. Gladstone
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
– Emma Goldman
Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.
– Anne Grant
There's no greater way to gain an audience's sympathy than by being unfortunate.
– Seth Green
More negatives write than call. It's a cheap shot for me to go on the air with the critical letters or E-mail I get because the reaction of the listeners is always an instantaneous expression of sympathy for me and contempt for the poor critic.
– John Hall
Sympathy with nature is part of a good person's religion.
– Francis Herbert Hedge
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.
– William Hull
The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.
– Washington Irving
Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.
– Alphonse de Lamartine
Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.
– James Russell Lowell
When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.
– George MacDonald
Our trials, our sorrows, and our grieves develop us.
– Orison Swett Marden
Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.
– Joni Mitchell
We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.
– Charles Henry Parkhurst
Any relations in a social order will endure, if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality.
– George William Russell
It's no good being nice and young and naive. There's no good in that at all. You've got to do it all yourself, and you've gotta learn quick. And you can't look for sympathy either.
– Johnny Rotten
A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier times.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
– Henry David Thoreau
Tears are the silent language of grief.
– Voltaire
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.
– Walt Whitman
If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.
– Oscar Wilde
Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.
– Xenophon
You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.
– Max Beerbohm
You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.
– Laura Carmichael
You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.
– Nigella Lawson
Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.
– Angelina Grimke
Whether rich people make money or lose money, they get no sympathy from the public.
– Gary Ackerman
When you've been raised in care, rap music isn't just about guns and sexism. They're talking about real things you can hang on to, problems of identity that you have sympathy with. It's not just about the music, with rap: when I was in care, it meant a whole lot more than that.
– Samantha Morton
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
– William Shakespeare
We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.
– Confucius
We are living at a time when creeds and ideologies vary and clash. But the gospel of human sympathy is universal and eternal.
– Samuel Hopkins Adams
We all have to announce our full solidarity with the struggle of those seeking freedom and justice in Syria, and translate this sympathy into a clear political vision that supports a peaceful transition to a democratic system of rule that reflects the demands of the Syrian people for freedom.
– Mohammed Morsi
Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.
– Meister Eckhart
To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
– Ivan Turgenev
To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.
– Queen Elizabeth II
This sympathy is not translated into force against the British government because it is not like the anti- apartheid movement which had a high profile here and Mandela is a more engaging figure than Yasser Arafat.
– Tom Paulin
They weren't impatient for the boys to turn into cartoons again. They awarded sympathy, gave compassion. Because deep down they had found parts of themselves in the characters. You said it George.
– Audrey Meadows
There's something very beautiful and compelling about someone who has ambition and someone who knows what they want, but it can get a little frustrating at times, so I understand that. I have sympathy for that.
– Michael Ealy
There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.
– Les Aspin
There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.
– Irving Babbitt
The professional must learn to be moved and touched emotionally, yet at the same time stand back objectively: I've seen a lot of damage done by tea and sympathy.
– Anthony Storr
The only cure for grief is action.
– George Henry Lewes
The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.
– Goldwin Smith
The cure for sorrow is to learn something.
– Barbara Sher
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
– William James
Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.
– Lillie Langtry
Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.
– Ben Elton
Since this war began our sympathy has gone out to all the suffering people who have been dragged into it. Further hundreds of millions have become involved since I spoke at Limerick fortnight ago.
– Eamon de Valera
Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all.
– Laura Ingalls Wilder
Recognition of belligerency as an expression of sympathy is all very well.
– Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
Reasoned arguments and suggestions which make allowance for the full difficulties of the state of war that exists may help, and will always be listened to with respect and sympathy.
– Stafford Cripps
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.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.
– Ann Landers
Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Okay, so, sometimes in life, I can be a score-keeper - someone who keeps track of what he gives and what he gets in return. An annoying quality, to say the least, and I'm sure my wife has your sympathy, but it's made me highly attuned to when and where credit is due.
– Mark Feuerstein
My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.
– Agnes Smedley
My guitar was loud as hell, and I had no sympathy for anybody else.
– Brownie McGhee
Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.
– Henry Ossawa Tanner
Like many people, most Libertarians feel empathy and sympathy for less fortunate people. But they know you can't have perfection in a world of limited resources.
– Harry Browne
Life has never been easy. Nor is it meant to be. It is a matter of being joyous in the face of sorrow.
– Dirk Benedict
It's hard for me to think of others because I'm not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.
– Alan Hovhaness
It is the right of our people to organize to oppose any law and any part of the Constitution with which they are not in sympathy.
– Alfred E. Smith
It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.
– Nellie Bly
IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.
– Carl Clinton Van Doren
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.
– Jerome K. Jerome
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.
– F. H. Bradley
Interest does not tie nations together it sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite them.
– Woodrow Wilson
In externals we advance with lightening express speed, in modes of thought and sympathy we lumber on in stage-coach fashion.
– Frances E. Willard
If we wait until our lives are free from sorrow or difficulty, then we wait forever. And miss the entire point.
– Dirk Benedict
If the terrorists have the sympathy of people, it's much harder to find them. So we need people on our side, and that leads us to be responsible leaders of the world, show some concern with the problems.
– George Soros
I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.
– Edward Norton
I've always liked Saturn. But I also have some sympathy for Pluto because I heard it's been downgraded from a planet, and I think it should remain a planet. Once you've given something planetary status it's kind of mean to take it away.
– Jared Leto
I'm not looking for sympathy at all.
– Arnold Schwarzenegger