658 Quotes About Sympathy

Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.

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.

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.

We are born with the innate capacity to express empathy. Experiencing our own cuts and bruises, encountering our own difficulties and disappointments, expands our cognitive world and rouses the universal desire to understand and comfort other people in pain.

If we were to actually walk a mile in the other person’s shoes, there’s a good chance that we’d end up opting to live the rest of our lives walking barefoot.

I wasn't offering her pity," Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. "Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy.

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

Be the person you needed when you needed help.

We had, I felt, bared small pieces of our symmetrical souls to each other, fast, as if playing one of those breathless card games, and I had pretended to be as moved as I had been the first time I uncovered it all myself, back in East Hampton.