Sympathy Quotes

Most popular sympathy quotes

To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization. - Abraham Lincoln quote.
To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.

civilization

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

honesty

There is no greater loan than a sympathetic ear.

listening

Sainthood emerges when you can listen to someone's tale of woe and not respond with a description of your own.

holding your tongue listening

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? - Susan Sontag quote.
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours?

books

True sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul. - Martin Luther King Jr. quote.
True sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

Giving

Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery. - Edward Gibbon quote.
Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.

misery

Self-pity dries up our sympathy for others.

self-pity

Sympathy is the charm of human life.
Sympathy is a sweet thing. - Louisa May Alcott quote.
Sympathy is a sweet thing.
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 quote.
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.
The more we feel sorry for ourselves, the less sorry others will feel for us.  People don't waste their small store of sympathy on those who can provide it so richly for themselves. - Gerald Brenan quote.
The more we feel sorry for ourselves, the less sorry others will feel for us.  People don't waste their small store of sympathy on those who can provide it so richly for themselves.
I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction.  I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta.  On the whole, I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. - Kenneth Clark quote.
I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction.  I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta.  On the whole, I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.
The power to console is not within corporeal reach—though its attempt is precious. - Emily Dickinson quote.
The power to console is not within corporeal reach—though its attempt is precious.
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.  They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. - Ralph Waldo Emerson quote.
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.  They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.

vice

Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.
Self-love, so sensitive in its own cause, has rarely any sympathy to spare for others. - Madame de Stael quote.
Self-love, so sensitive in its own cause, has rarely any sympathy to spare for others.
There are times when sympathy is as necessary as the air we breathe.
Rose Pastor Stokes I Belong to the Working Class: The Unfinished Autobiography of Rose Pastor Stokes
Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.  They will educate themselves under right conditions.
Sympathy is more effectually administered by indirect means than by the crowbars of consolation with which our friends, even the kindest, are apt to belabor our grief.
To desire and expect nothing for oneself–and to have profound sympathy for others–is genuine holiness. - Ivan Turgenev quote.
To desire and expect nothing for oneself–and to have profound sympathy for others–is genuine holiness.
If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world. - Oscar Wilde quote.
If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.