Sympathy & Compassion Quotes

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Sympathy is one of the principles most widely rooted in our nature: we rejoice to see ourselves reflected in another; and, perversely enough, we sometimes have a secret pleasure in seeing the sin which dwells in ourselves existing under a deformed and monstrous aspect in another.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy.

You develop a sympathy for all human beings when you travel a lot.

The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.

More compassionate mind, more sense of concern for other's well-being, is source of happiness.

As Christians, our compassion is simply a response to the love that God has already shown us.

I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is not in their power to help themselves.

The more sympathy you give, the less you need.

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.

Sympathy with nature is part of a good person's religion.

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom.

Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you're clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person's feelings even if you've never experienced them yourself.

It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.

Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

Empathy is the starting point for creating a community and taking action. It's the impetus for creating change.

Compassion does not just happen. Pity does, but compassion is not pity. It's not a feeling. Compassion is a viewpoint, a way of life, a perspective, a habit that becomes a discipline - and more than anything else, compassion is a choice we make that love is more important than comfort or convenience.

The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.

Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments - who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know.

A compassionate mind is very difficult to cultivate because compassion demands a sense of equality between all living beings.

Sometimes we are separated by differences, and sometimes we are united by common ideals of respect and compassion.

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.

The exercise of benevolence is joy to loving hearts: the more pain it costs, the more joy it is. Kind actions make us happy, and in such joy we find communion with the great heart of Jesus.

Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched.

As a society, we come up lacking in many of the marks of compassion and wisdom by which we measure ourselves as civilized.

I realized a while back that I have an innate ability to be compassionate, and I saw that the strength of compassion is something that healers have and healers use.'

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.

No human heart is denied empathy. No religion can demolish that by indoctrination. No culture, no nation and nationalism - nothing can touch it because it is empathy.

Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

If you aren't humble, whatever empathy you claim is false and probably results from some arrogance or the desire to control. But true empathy is rooted in humility and the understanding that there are many people with as much to contribute in life as you.

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother.

The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

The dew of compassion is a tear.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.

Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.

Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.

Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.

Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.