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Sympathy Quotes

Browse 839 quotes about Sympathy.

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Sympathy Quotes

“Begin at the beginning. Know nothing. Tabula rasa. At the same time, part of me wanted to distinguish myself. To let her sense the bond we shared straightaway. Maybe subtly hint at some of my secret intelligence. A secret handshake. A nod. I now completely understood how criminal masterminds could so easily get caught before the big reveal—the temptation to boast about the execution was huge.”

SympathyVillainsOlivia SudjicBig RevealCriminal Masterminds
Book:Sympathy
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“Duck farming is a 24/7 thing. But that's OK, because I'm a caffeine junky. I'm also addicted to cheese. Why does alcoholism get classified as a disease, but I get no sympathy for fiending for brie?”

AddictionSympathyDucksCheeseDuckDuck FarmDuck FarmingCheese AddictionAddicted To Cheese
Book:Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.
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“I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.”

FatherPoliticsAwarenessAtheistCommunismGermanyCommunistSympathyHolocaustChristian ChurchJewsCommunist PartyAntisemitismGas ChambersSteinbeckMinisterConcentration CampsJohn SteinbeckThe Grapes Of WrathFinal SolutionChrist KillersCongregational Minister
Author:Phillip Adams
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“There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of. In the 1960's, in my home town of Jackson, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered on night in darkness and I wrote a story that same night about the murderer (identity unknown) called "Where Is The Voice Coming From?" But all that absorbed me, though it started as outrage, was the necessity I felt for entering into the mind and inside the skin of a character who could hardly have been more alien or repugnant to me. Trying for my utmost, I wrote in the first person. I was wholly vaunting the prerogative of the short-story writer. It is always vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside another person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose. I'm not sure this story was brought off; and I don't believe that my anger showed me anything about human character that my sympathy and rapport never had.”

ImagineAngerWriterSympathyRapportRepugnantCivil Rights MurderMedgar Evers
Book:On Writing
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“it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.”

PainUnderstandingHealthDepressionMental IllnessSympathyTormentComprehensionDepressedSufferer
Book:Darkness visible: a memoir of madness
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“Darwin's theory was received in Russia with profound sympathy. While in Western Europe it met firmly established old traditions which it had first to overcome, in Russia its appearance coincided with the awakening of our society after the Crimean War and here it immediately received the status of full citizenship and ever since has enjoyed widespread popularity.”

ScienceTheoryEvolutionRussiaBiologySympathyPopularityCitizenshipScientific TheoryTheory Of EvolutionDarwinWestern EuropeCharles DarwinCrimean War
Author:Vladimir Onufrievich Kovalevskiĭ
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“Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don't know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterwards. I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don't know what you want because you don't know who you're supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alices in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways.”

IdentityUncertaintyDecision MakingFinding YourselfSympathyMultiverseOut Of ControlOlivia Sudjic
Book:Sympathy
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“It's taxing to consider the circumstances that can take an unmarked human canvas and make it rage-filled and petty and lost. It's not fun to have sympathy for the people who are trying to hurt you. But their actions can sometimes make sense: what's easier than trying to get better is trying to break something else down.”

HurtEmpathyRageSympathyPettiness
Book:One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
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“Just because she doesn't talk about it, doesn't mean she isn't feeling it. She hurts, but she won't wear it on her sleeve. She will never let an illness, a diagnosis, or a prediction, define her. She doesn't want sympathy, because that type of attention is not her goal. She'd rather you see the woman who smiles in the face of adversity, than be the one who begs you to see her frown.”

PoetryHurtAdversityWomanSympathy
Book:Abandoned Breaths
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“Nick leans down and kisses my eyelids. “Loving you, Zara, is a full-time job. It’s a great job, don’t get me wrong. It’s the best job in the universe. But it is not easy, because you tend to . . .” “Get hurt?” Betty suggests. “Find trouble? Pass out? Break arms?” “All of the above.” Nick laughs. My hand finds Nick’s wrist and I grab onto its thickness. “You know, I’m the patient here. Where’s the bedside manner? Where’s the sympathy?” “Zara, sympathy is just a good excuse to buy greeting cards and make sorry eyes and secretly gloat over how glad you are that you aren’t the person whose crap is hanging out there for the world to see,” Betty says.”

HumorDifficultHurtSorryExcuseCardsSympathyZara WhiteNick ColtBetty WhiteLove Job
Book:Captivate
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“Speaking a painful truth should be done only in love - like wielding a sword with no hilt - it should pain oneself in direct proportion to the amount of force exerted.”

LoveReasonWisdomTruthPainPurposePassionForcePeaceHurtJusticeEmotionCompassionKindnessCourageGraceNiceSacrificeHonestyHumilityPrideHonorEgoJudgmentEmpathyCriticismMercyBraveryPatienceInjusticeCarefulCaringKarmaPitySelfishnessSensitiveArroganceInjuryFeelingSympathyTendernessSelflessnessGentlenessNobilityDiscernmentEffectivenessCautiousReapGospelBad NewsSobrietySelf SacrificeApologeticsInsensitiveSwordConsiderateFriendlinessRebukeHarshnessReproofInconsiderateSowBluntnessSacrificial LoveReap What You SowSword Of TruthPainful TruthsHilt
Book:Healology
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“Curiosity and imagination are bound together. The age-old human urge to peek behind other people's drawn shutters, the eagerness to compare one's own intimate secrets with the secret intimacy of others, is an urge that may serve as an antidote to the fanatic's lust to murder the difference between himself and others. Or to kill anyone who refuses to change and declines to be exactly like him.”

HateImaginationEmpathyCuriosityIntimacySympathyDear Zealots
Book:שלום לקנאים
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“I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.”

LoveMindMeanTruthHateJusticeBrainCompassionKindnessNiceTheoryBalanceEmpathyMercyAffairSimplicityCaringPityCrueltyCombinationComplexitySympathyOffensiveSuspiciousLove AffairCaring For OthersSophisticationApologeticsDuplicityRendezvous
Book:Healology
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“Pity" Amir sat on the same old wooden chair Roua still remembers vividly the furniture store where she bought that chair - less than a month after their wedding… The furniture store closed its doors a long time ago, Along with the doors of their stormy pre-marital love story perhaps in due to boredom or the shocks of the years… She would cut his hair, a habit that began when they were poor and Amir couldn’t afford a barber … Years went by and many things changed, But Roua kept cutting his hair on the same wooden chair almost once a month… He sat in his underwear She looked at his saggy skin that was getting looser and his belly getting slightly bigger with each haircut… She began wandering in her mind and wondering whether she ever loved him, or was it an overwhelming infatuation that turned into pity over the years without ever passing through the corridors of love? Her emotions kept swinging between love or pity with each snip … She was frightened to admit it was pity, for the price was almost her entire life… Yet she couldn’t sincerely determine it was love, for she hasn’t felt any love towards him for quite a time… Suddenly, she caught Amir looking at her as if he could read her mind… A tear involuntarily rolled down her eye as she continued cutting his hair… [Original poem published in Arabic on August 3, 2023 at ahewar.org]”

LoveMarriageAgingPityBoredomSympathyArabic PoetryArabic LiteratureAge GapEnd Of Love
Author:Louis Yako
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“Alas! the very attempt could not fail to encounter the ridicule of the mob, the obloquy of the sensual, and the sneers of the unfeeling. The advocate of mercy would incur the reproach of misanthropy, and be traduced as a wild unsocial animal, who had formed a nefarious design to curtail the comforts of human life (7).—Good God! and is compassion then so great a crime? Is it so heinous an offence against society, to respect in other animals that principle of life which they have received, no less than man himself, at the hand of Nature? O, mother of every living thing! O, thou eternal fountain of beneficence; shall I then be persecuted as a monster, for having listened to thy sacred voice? to that voice of mercy which speaks from the bottom of my heart; while other men, with impunity, torment and massacre the unoffending animals, while they fill the air with the cries of innocence, and deluge thy maternal bosom with the blood of the most amiable of thy creatures.”

CompassionEmpathyKillingIndifferenceSympathyAnimalsApathyRidiculeVegetarianismDerision
Book:The Cry of Nature; Or, an Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals
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“The gut is the seat of all feeling. Polluting the gut not only cripples your immune system, but also destroys your sense of empathy, the ability to identify with other humans.”

MindHumansFeelingsCareSpiritualityEmotionBrainAttitudeCompassionEmpathyEmotionsConscienceMedicineCaringRelateSensitiveReasoningSympathyApathyNervous SystemImmune SystemNot CaringImmunityEmpatheticIdentifyGutNeurologicalDesensitizedDesensitize
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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