Nature Sympathy Quotes & Sayings

Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture. — Frank Lloyd Wright

George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist ... But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears. — Virginia Woolf

Instances can often arise in which the person in question would need the love and sympathy of others, and he would have no hope of getting the help he desires, being robbed of it by this law of nature — Anonymous

The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. — Henry David Thoreau

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling. — Bernard Herrmann

We have one unerring guide...Call it love, charity, or sympathy; it is the best, the angelic portion of us. It teaches us to feel pain at others pain, joy in their joy. The more entirely we mingle our emotions with those of others, making our well or ill being depend on theirs, the more completely do we cast away our selfishness, and approach the perfection of our nature. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

For me, I can't understand something unless I've experienced it and I tend to be very judgmental by nature. But, it's very telling when you see the world from the other side of the lens because it opens the door to self-discovery. Perspective changes everything. I prefer empathy to sympathy if I have a choice. That's where the research comes in. I've packed a lot of life into the past few years trying to understand people and situations. Trying to make sense of my life. I have a lot to work through. My past is something that requires introspection and forgiveness. And that takes time. Research. When I feel like I've learned something about myself and grown as a person, I move on to the next journey. Hopefully with new perspective. — Kim Holden

But better far it is to speak
One simple word, which now and then
Shall waken their free nature in the weak
And friendless sons of men. — James Russell Lowell

It is the will of God and Nature that these mortal bodies be laid aside, when the soul is to enter into real life; 'tis rather an embrio state, a preparation for living; a man is not completely born until he be dead: Why then should we grieve that a new child is born among the immortals? — Benjamin Franklin

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The goodness of God is that which disposes Him to be kind, cordial, benevolent, and full of good will toward men. He is tenderhearted and of quick sympathy, and His unfailing attitude toward all moral beings is open, frank, and friendly. By His nature He is inclined to bestow blessedness and He takes total pleasure in the happiness of His people.1 — Chip Ingram

In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end. — Daniel Wallace

The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification, worship- all of which make him feel that he is a part of some larger entity which transcends the boundaries of the individual self. This psychological urge to belong, to participate, to commune is as primary and real as its opposite. The all-important question is the nature of that higher entity of which the individual feels himself a part. — Arthur Koestler

By firm immutable immortal laws Impress'd on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE,
Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy with potent charm
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,
And bind Society in golden chains. — Erasmus Darwin

Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist's nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences. — Thomas Mann

Nature has concatenated our fortunes and affections together with indissoluble bands of mutual sympathy. — Isaac Barrow

You can read all the books in the world on the Nazi concentration camps and the gas chambers, and yet reality will draw upon you only when you are put through that yourself. It is a law of God, or nature, if you prefer, that pain, suffering and grief cannot be transferred or known by proxy. Neither empathy nor sympathy but experience alone is a valid currency of affliction. It alone makes you a card-holding member all allows you to join the club of the wretched of the earth. All else is counterfeit. — Kiran Nagarkar

The realization of our soul has its moral and its spiritual side. The moral side represents training of unselfishness, control of desire; the spiritual side represents sympathy and love. They should be taken together and never separated. The cultivation of the merely moral side of our nature leads us to the dark region of narrowness and hardness of heart, to the intolerant arrogance of goodness; and the cultivation of the merely spiritual side of our nature leads us to a still darker region of revelry in intemperance of imagination. — Rabindranath Tagore

To one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest. — Mark Twain

The experience of humanism is that 'nothing human is alien to me'; that I carry within myself all of humanity; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and the saint. I am the child and the adult. I am the man who lived 100000 years ago and the man who will live 100000 years from now. — Erich Fromm

The highest genius never flowers in satire, but culminates in sympathy with that which is best in human nature, and appeals to it. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Nonviolent actions are by their nature androgynous. In them the two impulses that have long been treated as distinct, 'masculine' and 'feminine,' the impulse of self-assertion and the impulse of sympathy, are clearly joined; the very genius of nonviolence, in fact, is that it demonstrates them to be indivisible, and so restores human community ... — Barbara Deming

The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain ... But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory. — Alfred North Whitehead

It was so important that she should understand something of what his life in this country had been; that she should grasp the nature of the loneliness that he wanted her to nullify. And it was so devilishly difficult to explain. It is devilish to suffer from a pain that is all but nameless. Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable diseases! Blessed are the poor, the sick, the crossed in love, for at least other people know what is the matter with them and will listen to their belly-achings with sympathy. But who that has not suffered it understands the pain of exile? — George Orwell

Compassion does not only refine and civilize human nature, but has something in it more pleasing and agreeable, than what can be met with in such an indolent happiness, such an indifference to mankind, as that in which the stoics placed their wisdom. As love is the most delightful passion, pity is nothing else but love softened by a degree of sorrow: In short, it is a kind of pleasing anguish, anguish as well as generous sympathy, that knits mankind together, and blends them in the same common lot. — Richard Steele

Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful,
the human soul! — James Russell Lowell

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege. — Thomas Mann

Christ's boundless grace confronts our deep necessities. Christ's promised presence confronts our sad and gloomy loneliness. Jesus thus filled with grace so overflowing, with love so tender, with sympathy so exquisite, with power so illimitable, with resources so boundless, with a nature so changeless, stands before us and says to each trembling heart, 'Fear not!' — Octavius Winslow

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if anyone should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? — Henry David Thoreau

It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is. — Gertrude Atherton

I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel. — Thomas Huxley

Sympathy with nature is part of a good person's religion. — Francis Herbert Hedge

Men take on the nature and the habits and the power of thought of those with whom they associate in a spirit of sympathy and harmony. — Napoleon Hill

Adam Smith's image of competition in the marketplace was intended as an adjunct to his detailed description of human motivation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments , in which the pursuit of profit is tempered at every juncture by sympathy and benevolence, and by the posture of the "impartial spectator" which is forced on us by our moral nature. — Ted Malloch

Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth,
Share in the tree top's joyance, and conceive
Of sunshine and wide air and winged things,
By sympathy of nature, so do I — James Russell Lowell

I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in turn, seems the loveliest. — Mark Twain

Man is a little world--a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a fetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding directly from the Highest Cause--the Spiritual Light of the World? This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature--the spiritual and the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that 'The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third, the paradigm, or pattern of the universe;' the three constituting the Intelligible Triad. — Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

A tale is told of twin boys born to different mothers.
One is dark by nature, the other light. One is rich, the other poor. One is harsh, the other gentle. One is forever youthful, the other old before his time.
One is mortal.
They share no bond of blood or sympathy, but they are twins nonetheless.
They each live without ever knowing that they are brothers.
They each die fighting the blind god. — Matthew Woodring Stover

Love is the divine Mother's arms; when those arms are spread, every soul falls into them.
The Sufis of all ages have been known for their beautiful personality. It does not mean that among them there have not been people with great powers, wonderful powers and wisdom. But beyond all that, what is most known of the Sufis is the human side of their nature: that tact which attuned them to wise and foolish, to poor and rich, to strong and weak
to all. They met everyone on his own plane, they spoke to everyone in his own language. What did Jesus teach when he said to the fishermen, 'Come hither, I will make you fishers of men?' It did not mean, 'I will teach you ways by which you get the best of man.' It only meant: your tact, your sympathy will spread its arms before every soul who comes, as mother's arms are spread out for her little ones. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

The serenity produced by the contemplation and philosophy of nature is the only remedy for prejudice, superstition, and inordinate self-importance, teaching us that we are all a part of Nature herself, strengthening the bond of sympathy which should exist between ourselves and our brother man ... — Luther Burbank

Sometimes we think that to develop an open heart, to be truly loving and compassionate, means that we need to be passive, to allow others to abuse us, to smile and let anyone do what they want with us. Yet this is not what is meant by compassion. Quite the contrary. Compassion is not at all weak. It is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world. Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, and to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal. To develop this mind state of compassion ... is to learn to live, as the Buddha put it, with sympathy for all living beings, without exception. — Sharon Salzberg

I cannot love evergreens - they are the misanthropes of nature. To them the spring brings no promise, the autumn no decline; they are cut off from the sweetest of all ties with their kind - sympathy ... I will have no evergreens in my garden; when the inevitable winter comes, every beloved plant and favorite tree shall drop together - no solitary fir left to triumph over the companionship of decay. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Common interest may always be reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy. — Alexander Hamilton

No, no, no, it cannot be," she cried; "she cannot feel. Her kindness is not sympathy; her good-nature is not tenderness. All that she wants is gossip; and she only likes me now because I supply it. — Jane Austen

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly. — Julian Barnes

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

A person imbued with compassion and self-understanding can readily love oneself and exhibit endless sympathy for all people. A person who is unkind to their self can never transcend their corrupt barriers much less run into the world with open arms enthusiastically embracing humankind and all of nature with uninhibited friendliness and goodwill. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine; she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments, but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature; nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original; she used to repeat sounding phrases from books; she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment, but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her — Charlotte Bronte

His face bore an expression that mingled haughty disdain with a tender, ardent sympathy, as if he would love all things if only his nature could let him forget their defects. — Philip Pullman

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Now please let me introduce myself
I'm the wealthy charming man
Been here on earth for many, many years
Many hearts, faiths and souls I stole

I was around and watched Jesus Christ
Had his faith, doubt and pain
Conned goddamn Pontus Pilate
To wash his hands and doom his soul

Thrilled to meet you
Do you guess my name
Thought I'm in hell but no I'm right here
That's the puzzling nature of my game — Dauglas Dauglas

After the creation of Adam every living creature was brought before him to receive its name; he saw that to each had been given a companion, but among them "there was not found an help meet for him." Among all the creatures that God had made on the earth, there was not one equal to man. And God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him." Man was not made to dwell in solitude; he was to be a social being. Without companionship the beautiful scenes and delightful employments of Eden would have failed to yield perfect happiness. Even communion with angels could not have satisfied his desire for sympathy and companionship. There was none of the same nature to love and to be loved. — Ellen G. White

Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small - too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community - and this is crucial. — Wendell Berry

I look at it this way ... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers ... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse. — George Carlin

The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics,
we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom. — Henry David Thoreau

The nature of men and of organized society dictates the maintenance in every field of action of the highest and purest standards of justice and of right dealing ... By justice the lawyer generally means the prompt, fair, and open application of impartial rules; but we call ours a Christian civilization, and a Christian conception of justice must be much higher. It must include sympathy and helpfulness and a willingness to forego self-interest in order to promote the welfare, happiness, and contentment of others and of the community as a whole. — Woodrow Wilson

LIFE'S work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. — Pema Chodron

With a perversity of judgement, which must be attributed to his not having by Nature a very strong head, the Graces, the Spirit, the Sagacity, and the Perseverance, of the Villain of the Story outweighed all his absurdities and all his Atrocities with Sir Edward. With him, such Conduct was Genius, Fire and Feeling. It interested and inflamed him; and he was always more anxious for its Success and mourned over its Discomfitures with more Tenderness than could ever have been contemplated by the Authors. — Jane Austen

I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side, ... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves. — Henry David Thoreau

The pleasant converse of the fireside, the simple songs of home, the words of encouragement as I bend over my school-tasks, the kiss as I lie down to rest, the patient bearing with the freaks of my restless nature, the gentle counsels mingled with reproofs and approvals, the sympathy that meets and assuages every sorrow, and sweetens every little success
all these return to me amid the responsibilities which press upon me now, and I feel as if I had once lived in heaven, and, straying, had lost my way. — J.G. Holland

I knew one boy who passed through several schools a dunce and a laughing-stock; the National Board and the Intermediate Board had sat in judgment upon him and had damned him as a failure before men and angels. Yet a friend and fellow-worker of mine discovered that he was gifted with a wondrous sympathy for nature, that he loved and understood the ways of plants, that he had a strange minuteness and subtlety of observation - that, in short, he was the sort of boy likely to become an accomplished botanist. — Padraic Pearse

This compassion, or sympathy with the pains of others, ought also to extend to the brute creation, as far as our necessities will admit; for we cannot exist long without the destruction of other animal or vegetable beings either in their mature or embryon state. Such is the condition of mortality, that the first law of nature is 'eat, or be eaten.' Hence for the preservation of our existence we may be supposed to have a natural right to kill those brute creatures, which we want to eat, or which want to eat us; but to destroy even insects wantonly shows an unreflecting mind, or a depraved heart. — Erasmus Darwin

The inclination to share thoughts with one another is probably an original impulse of our nature.If in pain I wish to let you know it,and ask your sympathy and assistance;and my pleasurable emotions also,I wish to communicate to,and share with you. — Abraham Lincoln

If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth. — Havelock Ellis

You cannot have a deep sympathy with both man & nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Compassion is the feeling of sympathy which the pain of one being awakens in another; and the higher and more human the beings are, the more keenly attuned they are to re-echo the note of suffering, which, like a voice from heaven, penetrates the heart, bringing all creatures a proof of their kinship in the universal God. And as for man, whose function it is to show respect and love for God's universe and all its creatures, his heart has been created so tender that it feels with the whole organic world ... mourning even for fading flowers; so that, if nothing else, the very nature of his heart must teach him that he is required above everything to fe the brother of all beings, and to recognize the claim of all beings to his love and his beneficence.
Horeb, Chapter 17, Verse 125 — Pirkei Avot

That was the way with folk; full of sympathy for the plight of others until something was asked of them. — Sam J. Charlton

Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, — Salman Rushdie

My landscapes are not only beautiful, or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature. Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless, the total antithesis of ourselves. — Gerhard Richter

[W]hether it is debates over men sharing housework and child-rearing, the 'crisis' of marriage and behind that the broader crisis of male-female relationships in adjusting to social change, or the increased sympathy for (or at least tolerance of) lesbian and gay demands for equal legal rights, all these developments in heterosexuality are usually approached and conceptualised in piecemeal form and rarely provoke any debate about the changing nature of heterosexuality itself. — Richard Dunphy

The lack of social support and sympathy is an additional trial: disabled, but with the nature of her disability not clear - she is not, after all, manifestly blind or paralysed, manifestly anything - she tends to be treated as a phoney or a fool. — Oliver Sacks

Having observed the forces of all things natural and celestial and having examined by painstaking investigation the sympathy among those things, brings into the open powers hidden and stored away in nature; thus, magic links lower things (as if they were magical enticements) to the gifts of higher things ... so that astonishing miracles thereby occur. — Giambattista Della Porta

I hardly know where I found the hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger; the step was contrary to my nature and habits: but I think her occupation touched a chord of sympathy somewhere; — Charlotte Bronte

Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader's zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity? Scientific husbandry tells us to weed out the sick, the infirm, the weak. The ruthless efficiency of euthanasia initiatives and ethnic cleansing are but the programmatic application of Nietzsche's point: from any quantifiable cost-benefit analysis, the principles of animal husbandry should apply to the human race. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to "hard reason" rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of "the noblest part of our nature."6 It is the human heart resonating with empathy, not the logical brain attuned to the mathematics of efficiency, that revolts at cruelty and inhumanity. In — Terryl L. Givens

The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful home. Her sympathy was ours; her smile, her soft voice, the sweet glance of her celestial eyes, were ever there to bless and animate us. She was the living spirit of love to soften and attract: I might have become sullen in my study, rough through the ardour of my nature, but that she was there to subdue me to a semblance of her own gentleness. And — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

To be in one's own heart in kindly sympathy with all things; this is the nature of righteousness — Confucius

It is not merely the multiplicity of tints, the gladness of tone, or the balminess of the air which delight in the spring; it is the still consecrated spirit of hope, the prophecy of happy days yet to come; the endless variety of nature, with presentiments of eternal flowers which never shall fade, and sympathy with the blessedness of the ever-developing world. — Novalis

Most people are on the world, not in it - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. — John Muir

The mark of man is initiative, but the mark of woman is cooperation. Man talks about freedom; woman about sympathy, love, sacrifice. Man cooperates with nature; woman cooperates with God. Man was called to till the earth, to "rule over the earth"; woman to be the bearer of a life that comes from God. — Fulton J. Sheen

Obviously, therefore, we must be able to transcribe what is in us into our mental and objective consciousness, by establishing a relationship between the life in us and observation of that life in Nature. This we find supremely well expressed by the ancient Egyptians. It is a knowledge of magic, pure and sane, which can lead rapidly toward the spiritual goal of our lives, owing to the fact that we can evoke, by means of the sympathy of analogues in our surroundings, the consciousness of the heart latent in us. — R. A. Schwaller De Lubicz

He understands the texture and meaning of the visible universe, and 'sees into the life of things,' not by the help of mechanical instruments, but of the improved exercise of his faculties, and an intimate sympathy with Nature. The meanest thing is not lost upon him, for he looks at it with an eye to itself, not merely to his own vanity or interest, or the opinion of the world. Even where there is neither beauty nor use - if that ever were - still there is truth, and a sufficient source of gratification in the indulgence of curiosity and activity of mind. The humblest printer is a true scholar; and the best of scholars - the scholar of Nature. — William Hazlitt

In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The inclination to exchange thoughts with one another is probably an original impulse of our nature. If I be in pain I wish to let you know it, and to ask your sympathy and assistance; and my pleasurable emotions also, I wish to communicate to, and share with you. - ABRAHAM LINCOLN, February 11, 1859 — Joshua Wolf Shenk

Wherever I am, I see the yoke on women in some form or another. On some it sits easy for they are but beasts of burden. On others pride hushes them to silence; no complaint is made for they scorn pity or sympathy. On some it galls and chafes; they feel assured by every instinct of their nature that they were designed for a higher, nobler calling than to 'drag life's lengthening chain along. — Abby May Alcott

Themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I am quite sure that no friendship yields its true pleasure and nobility of nature without frequent communication, sympathy and service. — George Edward Woodberry

By the law of nature, there is no pleasure in suffering; but divine love, when it reigns in a heart, makes it take delight in its sufferings. — Alphonsus Liguori

I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [ ... ] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it. — David Attenborough

He who finds though that lets us penetrate even a little deeper into the eternal mystery of nature has been granted great grace. He who, in addition, experiences the recognition, sympathy, and help of the best minds of his times, had been given almost more happiness than one man can bear. — Albert Einstein

She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap. — Mary Webb