My Sympathies Quotes

“The law of our being is Love of Life, and its interests and adornments; love of the world in which our lot is cast, engrossment with the interests and affections of earth. Not a low or sensual love; not love of wealth, of fame, of ease, of power, of splendor. Not low worldliness; but the love of Earth as the garden on which the Creator has lavished such miracles of beauty; as the habitation of humanity, the arena of its conflicts, the scene of its illimitable progress, the dwelling-place of the wise, the good, the active, the loving, and the dear; the place of opportunity for the development by means of sin and suffering and sorrow, of the noblest passions, the loftiest virtues, and the tenderest sympathies.”

— Albert Pike

“Congratulations Lord Steldor, Princess Alera, my sympathies.”

— Cayla Kluver

“As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

— Charles Darwin

“Humans are unique in having the astonishing capacity to extend our sympathies far beyond the here and now. through time and space, to anywhere and anything we choose. It is our culture that decides how large and inclusive our moral circle is, but it is each of us who makes up our culture. (p.250)”

— Andrew Westoll

“Bear in mind, now, that most of this work was done by men who had no intention whatever, when they enlisted, of making war to end slavery. Slavery was killed by the act of war itself. It was the one human institution on all the earth which could not possibly be defended by force of arms, because that force, once called into play, was bound to destroy it. The Union armies which ended slavery were led by men like Grant and Sherman, who had profound sympathies with the South and who had never in their lives shown the slightest sympathies with the abolitionists. But they were also men who believed in the one great, fearful fact about modern war
that when you get into it, the guiding rule is that you have to win it.”

— Bruce Catton

“If Sally had been in an accident or come down with some overtly physical disease, I would not hesitate to tell him about it, confident that his sympathies would flow in my direction as a matter of course. But psychosis defies empathy; few people who have not experienced it up close buy the idea of a behavioral disease. It has the ring of an excuse, a license for self-absorption on the most extreme scale. It suggests that one chooses madness and not the other way around. (86)”

— Michael Greenberg

“The lawyer plays on sympathies, tugs on heartstrings, and twists everything around so that somehow the rapist or murderer becomes the victim. Perhaps the lawyer's story of neglect and abuse is true. Sad, perhaps. But to me, it never cut it as an excuse. The dead person is the victim, and the murderer is the murderer.”

— Rachel Reiland

“Unhand her," said a voice behind her. A voice she had never before thought she would be glad to hear. A voice that was commanding, strong and deep.
Her eyes popped open and she whirled around to find the duke standing right behind her. The man made a grab for her but the duke had already caught her waist and deposited her behind him.
"Let us go and I will not inform the authorities," the duke suggested.
The man sneered, "Lady in mine."
"Dear fellow, I would love to hand you over this young lady with all my sympathies, believe me. But my sister and my mother would have my head. She, you see, belongs to them.”

— Anya Wylde

“Despite his elegant appearance, Mr. Gweta's most striking asset was his alluring personality. Professor Khupe had met few such men in his life. Their warmth made everyone feel like they were their best friend. They were good men. However, they tended to be morally ambidextrous. If a stranger confessed to having been involved in a horrible crime, they would reserve judgment until they found out whether the confessor was the victim or victimizer. Once they knew, they would immediately lend their sympathies to the confessor's position. Their worldview was simple. They supported the first person to confide in them. Such men made good lawyers.”

— Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

“Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“My sympathies are Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts.”

— Louis MacNeice

“I've changed in my sympathies since I've become a mother myself. In high school I went through a period where I was close with my mom and had to break with her in order to find myself and come back. Since that was my experience, that's often what happens in my books.”

— Sarah Dessen

“I have to express sympathy from the bottom of my heart to those people who were taken as wartime comfort women. As a human being, I would like to express my sympathies, and also as prime minister of Japan I need to apologize to them.”

— Shinzo Abe

“My sympathies have always been for working-class people.”

— Christa McAuliffe

“Umberto Poli was born in Trieste in 1883, when the city was at its zenith as the major port of the Habsburgs. The irredentist sympathies of Umberto's Italian-speaking parents can be detected in their giving him the first name of the Italian emperor.”

— Susan Stewart

“You can't run a business based on sympathies; otherwise our business would be hampered.”

— Marc Rich

“I always received much more satisfaction as a defense attorney in obtaining an acquittal for a client than I ever have as a D.A. in obtaining a conviction. All my interests and sympathies tend to be on the side of the individual as opposed to the state.”

— Jim Garrison

“I now bid farewell to the country of my birth - of my passions - of my death; a country whose misfortunes have invoked my sympathies - whose factions I sought to quell - whose intelligence I prompted to a lofty aim - whose freedom has been my fatal dream.”

— Thomas Francis Meagher

“You've been playing on my sympathies as though they were harp strings. You-'
'What do you expect me to do?' he cut in. 'Play fair? With a woman who makes up her own rules as she goes along?'
'I expect you to take no for an answer!'
He rose. 'I should like to know what you're afraid of.'
'Afraid?' Her voice climbed. 'Afraid? Of you?'
'The only reason I can think of for your rejecting an opportunity to run the world as you see fit is fear that you can't manage the man offering the opportunity.”

— Loretta Chase

“The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.”

— Susan Sontag

“In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.”

— Jessamyn West

“My sympathies and my love went out to her, even as my hand had in the garden. I felt that years of the conventionalities of life could not teach me to know her sweet, brave nature as had this one day of strange experiences. Yet there were two thoughts which sealed the words of affection upon my lips. She was weak and helpless, shaken in mind and nerve. It was to take her at a disadvantage to obtrude love upon her at such a time. Worst still, she was rich.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

“Holmes. "Why, it might be a description of Watson!" "It's true," said the inspector, with amusement. "It might be a description of Watson." "Well, I'm afraid I can't help you, Lestrade," said Holmes. "The fact is that I knew this fellow Milverton, that I considered him one of the most dangerous men in London, and that I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge. No, it's no use arguing. I have made up my mind. My sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim, and I will not handle this case." Holmes had not said one word to me about the tragedy which we had witnessed, but I observed all the morning that he was in his most thoughtful mood, and he gave me the impression, from his vacant eyes and his abstracted manner, of a man who”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

“We must remember, however, that art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies.”

— Okakura Kakuzō

“A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.”

— Evan Osnos

“My sympathies go out to the young performers today because they are under a microscope in a way I wasn't. Now everybody's got a camera phone and can record at will or take pictures of you. It's just a different world. I don't know how I would have fared back then.”

— Ricky Schroder

“Somewhere in the distance he could hear a wireless playing Judy Garland's 'Over the Rainbow.' Wolf had seen the film but, had he been the one swept up to the magical land of Oz, he would have raised an army of flying monkeys, stuck the witches in a concentration camp, razed the Emerald City to the ground and executed the wizard for communist sympathies, being a Jew, a homosexual, intellectually retarded, or all of the above.
He did like the tune, though.”

— Lavie Tidhar

“Meditation is first quietness. We live in a great din. It is well to see (for who sees it not will have but narrow sympathies and understand little that occurs around him) that the noise is often a noble uproar, "deep calling unto deep," the clamor of wonderful machinery, of great labors, of human struggles, of heroes' voices. But storms, though grand, must sink if the sea is to show the stars.”

— James Vila Blake

“The unmerciful man is most certainly an unblessed man. His sympathies are all dried up; he is afflicted with a chronic jaundice, and lives timidly and darkly in a little, narrow rat-hole of distrust.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“My sympathies have always been with the everyday people ... the center of my photography.”

— Jerome Liebling

“We can not understand each other, if our sympathies are always safely tucked away; we can not understand each other, if our approaches are always academic or conventional; we can not understand each other, if we crawl back into our shells every time we see a worm across our path.”

— Ameen Rihani

“It matters what you believe. Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness and the feeling of being especially privileged. Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.”

— Sophia Lyon Fahs

“It was great to essentially have two protagonists where you're sympathies could go back and forth between the two of them, throughout the season.”

— Tony Goldwyn

“Your brother kills you." Fett hopped tpo his feet as lightly as any unarmoured jedi apprentice, the n added," Some things are worsse thean death. I know that better than anyone, except maybe Sintas-and Han Solo. Send your father my sympathies.”

— Troy Denning

“Sport hunting is a crime. My sympathies are with the fox.”

— Wallis Simpson

“December drops no weak, relenting tear, By our fond summer sympathies ensnared; Nor from the perfect circle of the year Can even winter's crystal gems be spared.”

— Christopher Pearse Cranch

“If I have learned anything in my long life it is to be grateful for every occasion when I followed my sympathies and avoided my antipathies.”

— Pearl S. Buck

“My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism .”

— Aldous Huxley

“A woman's best qualities do not reside in her intellect, but in her affections. She gives refreshment by her sympathies, rather than by her knowledge.”

— Samuel Smiles

“I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.”

— James A. Michener

“We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies”

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“Art, although produced by man's hands, is something not created by hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul ... My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the working of the soul.”

— Vincent Van Gogh

“It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that, when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem almost as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may these patient angels hover around us, watching for the spell which is so soon forgotten!”

— Charles Dickens

“The public is composed of numerous groups whose cry to us writers is: 'Comfort me.' 'Amuse me.' 'Touch my sympathies.' 'Make me sad.' 'Make me dream.' 'Make me laugh.' 'Make me shiver.' 'Make me weep.' 'Make me think.'”

— Guy De Maupassant

“The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

“I had a vivid imagination. Not only could I put myself in the other person's place, but I could not avoid doing so. My sympathies always went out to the weak, the suffering, and the poor. Realizing their sorrows I tried to relieve them in order that I myself might be relieved.”

— Clarence Darrow

“I have no commiseration for princes. My sympathies are reserved for the great mass of mankind ... .”

— Henry Clay

“Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar