No man can force the harp of his own individuality into the people's heart; but every man may play upon the chords of the people's heart, who draws his inspiration from the people's instinct.
Pity and need Make all flesh kin. There in no caste in blood.
To rejoice in another's prosperity is to give content to your lot; to mitigate another's grief is to alleviate or dispel your own
Happy is the man who has that in his soul which acts upon the dejected as April airs upon violet roots. Gifts from the hand are silver and gold, but the heart gives that which neither silver nor gold can buy. To be full of goodness, full of cheerfulness, full of sympathy, full of helpful hope, causes a man to carry blessings of which he is himself as unconscious as a lamp is of its own shining. Such a one moves on human life as stars move on dark seas to bewildered mariners; as the sun wheels, bringing all the seasons with him from the south.
Intercession means that we deliberately substitute God’s interests in others for our natural sympathy with them.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
Life has never been easy. Nor is it meant to be. It is a matter of being joyous in the face of sorrow.
True sympathy is putting ourselves in another's place; and we are moved in proportion to the reality of our imagination.
I stand by my kind; and I thank God for the temptations that have brought me into sympathy with them, as I do for the love that urges me to efforts for their good. I hail the great brotherhood of trial and temptation in the name of humanity, and give them assurance that from the Divine Man, and some, at least, of His disciples, there goes out to them a flood of sympathy that would fain sweep them up to the firm footing of the rock of safety.
Captain Hale, alone, without sympathy or support, save that from above, on the near approach of death asked for a clergyman to attend him. It was refused. He then requested a Bible; that too was refused by his inhuman jailer.
No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
Brian Turner writes as only a soldier can, of terror and compassion, hurt and horror, sympathy and desire. He takes us into the truth and trauma of the Iraq war in language that is precise, delicate and beautiful, even as it tells of a suicide bomber, a skull shattered by a bullet, a blade in a bloodgroove.
If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation.
News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil.
Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.
Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.
Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.