Appropriate Sympathy Quotes & Sayings

I had been reading a lot about pioneers in Australia and the colonization of Australia, and pioneers in Virginia and the early settlers in the United States, and I was fascinated by those communities and how they grew, how their politics developed, and the actual suffering of those people and the tribulations they went through. — Ben Richards

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties. — Edward Albee

I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. And this is one: I'm going to tell it - but take care not to smile at any part of it. — Emily Bronte

People fear getting famous just as pigs fear getting fat. Reflecting the observation that fame invites a fall just as a fattened pig invites the butcher. — Yu Hua

tender, thoughtful and affectionate. Men are more helped by sympathy, than by service; love is more than money, and a kind word will give more pleasure than a present."[23] If you live by yourself, you may have to get creative in finding ways to express love extravagantly. While the people at your work may look askance at you if you suddenly start handing out hugs, it's almost always appropriate to shake hands or touch a shoulder or an elbow lightly. Certainly there are people at your church who will be receptive to a hug. If not, find a different church! Those who love lavishly, extravagantly, find their souls flooded with joy. — Kay Warren

My prayers, my tears, my wishes, fears, and lamentations, were witnessed by myself and heaven alone. When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry - and often find it, too - whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonize with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical, perchance, but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart. — Anne Bronte

The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives. — Jurgen Moltmann

When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox — H.L. Mencken

Pain lanced through his neck. He gasped and his eyes flew open; Simon was sitting up on him, staring down with wide eyes, his hand across his own mouth. Simon's wounds were gone, though fresh blood stained the front of his shirt.
Jace could feel the pain of his bruised shoulders again, the slash across his wrist, his punctured throat. He could no longer hear his heart beating, but he knew it was slamming away inside his chest.
Simon took his hand away from his mouth. The fangs were gone. "I could have killed you," he said. There was a sort of pleading in his voice.
"I would have let you," said Jace. — Cassandra Clare

How would I ever know when that moment was right, when expectation met anticipation and formed ... connection? — Rachel Cohn

THEY WILL ALL BETRAY YOU, War said.
And they would. Whether it was her teachers or her friends or her family, they would all betray her. Maybe it would be couched in helpful terms, and maybe their faces would be brimming with sympathy. But in the end, they would all let her down.
They would all cut her down.
They would all slap labels on her and spoon-feed her appropriate words, wipe her mouth with their expectations. They
would wind her up and make her dance, and when they were done they'd put her away. They would keep doing it and doing it, until she was nothing more than a shell, a skin, something to slip on and slip off and tuck in at the corners.
They would ... unless she stopped them. — Jackie Morse Kessler

I've been a soldier all my life. I've fought from the ranks on up, you know my service. But sir, I must tell you now, I believe this attack will fail. No 15,000 men ever made could take that ridge. It's a distance of more than a mile, over open ground. When the men come out of the trees, they will be under fire from Yankee artillery from all over the field. And those are Hancock's boys! And now, they have the stone wall like we did at Fredericksburg.
- Lieutenant General James Longstreet to General Robert E. Lee after the initial Confederate victories on day one of the Battle of Gettysburg. — Michael Shaara

My head reeled at the sheer and startling beauty, the wide, bare openness of it. The sense of space, the vastness of the sky above and on either side made my heart race, I would have travelled a thousand miles to see this. I had never imagined such a place. — Susan Hill

I crouch beside her bed and stumble through the only prayer I know: now I lay me down to sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep. It's a appropriate, I think. And still I feel worthless. I want to comfort her, to chase her fears into the snow. But sympathy is buried in me, like a stone in the belly of a goat. And the goat is the rare animal that will eat garbage. I hold her hand until she falls asleep, then steal fifty dollars from her purse. — Will Christopher Baer