Best 335 quotes in «sympathy quotes» category

He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems - the way they had always.. because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener.

I also found it hard to accept the Mizuko I'd known in multiple miniatures was one physical person. I suppose it would feel the same waking up in bed with Jesus or Father Christmas, or any long-dead figurehead of an ancient cult. You know every word of every doctrine off by heart and then you see their toenails, gums, and vertebrae, not in pieces but all held together, and it's hard not to lose your shit.

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right. I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him.

I asked to use the bathroom and sat, recovering, on the edge of a marble bath on a dais—the kind Greek husbands are slain in.

He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it.

I became convinced that I was being watched. Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuko rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last—after everything and everyone else has escaped.

I beg you, alight and join your sorrow with mine: misfortune wanders everywhere, and settles now upon one and now upon another.

I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain.

I bask in that sympathy because it's nice to have somebody who cares, even if it's the wrong person for the wrong reasons.

I can’t hate him. All I feel is sympathy for the devil who has crawled inside my heart, stealing my soul and my will from me.

I can feel for anyone that is unjustly treated...and I can feel for those that injure them too.

I cannot live my life striving only for my own security, I can only feel secure when I see myself useful in other people's life.

I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.

I couldn't think of a reply except No, so I said, 'Sure.

I can't talk about my childhood at all, because cannot say "I" when I mean "we," and if I say "we" it leads to a conversation about how I have a dead sister, instead of what I want to talk about. I found that out in the summer. So I don't talk about it.

I can’t look people in the eye and tell them that they’re going to die anymore.

I don't want to alarm anyone, but everywhere we go I see Alec Baldwin. It's like he's following us.

I do not believe it possible for one to genuinely love Truth more than people (or vice versa). One might fall into the snare of loving the search more than people, or the pride of having exposed something or someone, but not the truth itself. For if you love Truth you love people; because to love people at all and without illusion, you must also love the truth about them.

I even felt a touch of sympathy for the difficulties he had faced in his life, however stupid and repulsive the shape of that life might appear to me.

I felt ashamed for having judged him so harshly without knowing the real boy. His one offense against me―goaded by Charlie’s bullying character―was easy to forgive.

I don't know, I can't know, but I almost did.

If a person's mind is controlled by forces of revenge and jealousy, it cannot express love & sympathy. And even if they show love and sympathy to others it will yield no good result. The thought will not be reflected in love but in hate.

If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.

I felt my own self-sufficiency, my own Walden Pond, seeping out of me as if I'd sprung a leak. Self soaked into everything around me—the floor, the walls, the one window, the grass. The words on the page.

I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.

If everything stays the same, it seems possible for someone to come back.

If we are genuinely concerned about engaging young people, particularly those that are vulnerable or at risk, we must listen to them properly.

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark.

I felt the nauseous shiver in my stomach—everything from rage to empathy to morning sickness—that I had grown used to and now thought of as being love.

If you read a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away." "But not one believes in that way what he reads in a novel," I said. "Oh, yes, they do," he cried. "If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.

If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

If you truly have compassion in your heart, show it by keeping your doubts to yourself and sharing your hope with those who love change!

Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.

I know I only want him,' she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, 'because he doesn't want me. How is that even possible?' 'It's normal to want what we can't have,' I said soothingly. 'No, I mean how can he not want me?

I had shelved expectations of another kiss; the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well—the proximity and denial.

[January 1944] As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive!

I know you want me to feel some sympathy for them, but that's not who I am. I care only about those I know, and even then, not all that deeply. Strangers get nothing from me.

I mean, you may cause others a spot of bother by your weaknesses, perhaps, but coping with you may possibly increase their strength and sympathy. But if you sin deliberately, even if it seems only against yourself--well--you won't be the only one to suffer. You may even be the one who suffers least.

I love men. Rather, I love little parts of their bodies, not the perfect parts, but rather their odd features and their unique traits that make of them stand out of this cookie cutter world we live in. Throw a name at me, and I can instantly tell you which feature makes my heart go thumpedy-thump. Cropper Rowe: lucious, mocha brown-colored mole on the back of his neck. Derek: long yet narrow sideburns. Thorsten: thick nose, which he broke skiing. Milo: jet black hair, slicked back to reveal forehead and a small dimple. Vincent: lower jawline as it curves up to his ears and the way his stubble grows on it. Thayer: his waist and how he wears his jeans low enough to expose his appendectomy scar. And I love Eugene's eyes. Not that they are clear blue, but that they have a kind shape. It sounds cliché, but they are soft, and when I look into them, I feel I've known him forever. The sadness still lingers deep inside them, but he smiles a lot. Maybe I'm mistaken and life has been kind to him. Maybe he's the positive kind of fellow for whom smiling comes easily, despite it all.

I'm going to have to get an entirely new social scene if I want to avoid him,' she said, hunting for evidence of him amongst her friends' feeds. I made a sympathetic face, but my heart leapt up onto her, beat its fists on her heart, yelled, Me Me Me!

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, we are beyond mercy.

In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.

I like spending time with healthy people whose brains are turned on.

In many cases, it was the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that fell for her man.

I no longer felt I could try to belong with these people.

In some cases, it is the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that has left her man for another.

In some rare cases, a friendship between two people benefits both of them, and what’s more, in some rarer cases, it benefits both of them equally.

Instantly I remembered everything I hated about him. But it was, in a way, comforting to know that he had not changed at all.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant makes it quite clear that sympathetic feelings are often welcome, amiable, desirable, beautiful. They can under certain conditions be good objectively, all things considered. But they are not morally good (V 82.18–25). A happy, well-rounded character is an ideal that lies beyond the sphere of Kant’s conception of morality.

In the months following James' death, on thought had returned time and again as she passed others in the street. What secrets did these people hold? What had they endured? She wondered how many people rushing in and out of shops, or on their way to their work, had lost a love, or known deep disappointment or grief, fear, or want, yet summoned the resilience to go on. Those lines across foreheads, those mouths downturned --- what were the ruts on life's road that wrought such marks, those signs of scars on the soul?