Sympathy - Quotes & Sayings

The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Albert Schweitzer

Badges mean nothing in themselves, but they mark a certain achievement and they are a link between the rich and the poor. For when one girl sees a badge on a sister Scout's arm, if that girl has won the same badge, it at once awakens an interest and sympathy between them.

Juliette Gordon Low

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

Victor Hugo

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.

Confucius

Both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.

Jesse Jackson

What is the meaning of 'gossip?' Doesn't it originate with sympathy, an interest in one's neighbor, degenerating into idle curiosity and love of tattling? Which is worse, this habit, or keeping one's self so absorbed intellectually as to forget the sufferings and cares of others, to lose sympathy through having too much to think about?

Lucy Larcom

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

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

Robert Baden-Powell

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.

Charles Henry Parkhurst

A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother.

Homer

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

Cristiano Ronaldo

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.

What is lovely never dies, But passes into other loveliness.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The loss of a friend is like that of a limb; time may heal the anguish of the wound, but the loss cannot be repaired.

Robert Southey

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

William Butler Yeats

The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.

George Bernard Shaw

What ye have been ye still shall be, When we are dust the dust among, O yellow flowers!

Henry Austin Dobson

From the end spring new beginnings.

Pliny the Elder

Too often, we get attention and sympathy by being a victim. If we're invested in someone being our villain, we must love being the victim. We have to let go of both characters in the story.

Regina Brett

Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish; Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.

Thomas Moore

Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.

Joni Mitchell

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

William James

Our trials, our sorrows, and our grieves develop us.

Orison Swett Marden

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

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

Desmond Tutu

Any other illness, any other disease that we're faced with, there's sympathy and understanding. We get help for those. With mental illness, our go-to is to categorize them as, 'Oh, they're crazy,' to belittle the problem.

Chris Wood

It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.

Nellie Bly

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.

John Lydon

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

Joyce Carol Oates

As human beings, we all have reasons for our behavior. There may be people who have certain physiological issues that dictate why they make certain choices. On the whole, though, I think we're dictated by our structure, our past, our environment, our culture. So once you understand the patterns that shape a person, how can you not find sympathy?

Forest Whitaker

If I'm feeling outraged, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, that gets channeled through me and into my pictures and hopefully transmitted to the viewer.

James Nachtwey

I think loss of loved ones is the hardest blow in life.

Marlo Thomas

The only cure for grief is action.

George Henry Lewes

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

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

Harold Bloom

The dew of compassion is a tear.

Lord Byron

If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

Oscar Wilde

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.

Ivan Turgenev

Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.

William Blake

Interest does not tie nations together; it sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite them.

Woodrow Wilson

As Christians, our compassion is simply a response to the love that God has already shown us.

Steven Curtis Chapman

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

Walt Whitman

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

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

After you have wept and grieved for your physical losses, cherish the functions and the life you have left.

Morrie Schwartz

People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.

Ann Landers

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

Jean Giraudoux

It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Our late Leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with his universal sympathy for all oppressed and his profound understanding of Jesus' revolutionary spirit of love and sacrifice, carried on his revolutionary work for forty years and brought about at last the liberation of the Chinese people.

Chiang Kai-shek