Top 100 Sympathies Quotes
#1. Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.
William E. Gladstone
#2. Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?
Don DeLillo
#3. Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful,
the human soul!
James Russell Lowell
#4. 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
#5. I want to be alone. Sympathies wasted on my hollow shell. I feel there's nothing left to fight for. No reason for a cause.
Sarah McLachlan
#6. Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It's a relationship like any other.
Vivian Gornick
#8. You can't run a business based on sympathies; otherwise our business would be hampered.
Marc Rich
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Midwest Radio would like to extend their sympathies to the families and loved ones of the dead
Mike McCormack
#12. 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
#13. BABE or BABY, n. A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex, or condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion.
Ambrose Bierce
#14. 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
#15. We will not refuse to help the helpless or lift up the fallen, but we will reuse to wallow in the mud because of our sympathies.
Ernest Holmes
#16. Congratulations Lord Steldor, Princess Alera, my sympathies.
Cayla Kluver
#18. I suppose that my inner soul - my dual personality - had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper - that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold.
Ford Madox Ford
#19. How narrow we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!
John Muir
#20. Properly speaking, he no longer held opinions; he had sympathies. To which party did he belong? To the party of humanity.
Victor Hugo
#21. Whether I am or am not a Communist is irrelevant. The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, may enjoy their constitutional rights.
Paul Robeson
#22. 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
#23. A lady is never disreputable in public, unless intended for manipulation of sympathies.
Gail Carriger
#24. I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
Salman Rushdie
#25. Presentiments are strange things: and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity had not yet found the key.
Charlotte Bronte
#26. you away, show where your sympathies lie." Chance laughed
Ciana Stone
#27. The author finds any freaking, and remarkably objective, way to estimate religion's influence on American society before the Civil War. The population closely aligned with evangelical sympathies was three or four times the size of the voting population in 1860
Mark A. Noll
#28. The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#29. Like many Americans my thoughts and prayers are with the people of London. My deepest sympathies are extended to those who lost a loved one in the recent terror attacks.
Doc Hastings
#30. 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
#31. What is good looking, as Horace Smith remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,-generous in your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#32. This airline is grateful for his extensive contributions and we will miss his friendship and support. We extend our deepest sympathies to the Casey family on its personal loss.
Gerard Arpey
#33. 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 Kakuzo
#34. 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
#35. Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight
this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one
this is business.
Mark Twain
#36. My sympathies have always been with the everyday people ... the center of my photography.
Jerome Liebling
#37. she clutched her purse and was completely composed, gracefully accepting people's sympathies, but when they started to shovel the dirt over old dick's coffin she began to weep, and her grief was strong enough to chase the sparrows from the trees.
Alice Hoffman
#38. 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
#39. Away, down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve.
Barbara Kingsolver
#40. My mother's sympathies were strongly with the Union. She knew that war was bound to come, but so confident was she in the strength of the Federal Government that she devoutly believed that the struggle could not last longer than six months at the utmost.
Buffalo Bill
#41. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Hanna Arendt
#42. He liked to be kindly treated, to be praised and petted, to be well fed and caressed; and they who so treated him were his chosen friends. He had in this the instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog.
Anthony Trollope
#43. 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
#44. A gentleman's first characteristic is that fineness of structure in the body which renders it capable of the most delicate sensation; and of structure in the mind which renders it capable of the most delicate sympathies; one may say simply fineness of nature.
John Ruskin
#45. Although Martin Luther's theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, or almost entirely German.
Andrew Pettegree
#46. First and foremost, I would like to extend my deepest sympathies to the family of Michael Brown. As I have said in the past, I know that, regardless of the circumstances here, they lost a loved one to violence. I know the pain that accompanies such a loss knows no bounds.
Robert P. McCulloch
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. the world was shrinking, sympathies changing;
Barack Obama
#50. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
Harold Bloom
#52. The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away.
Paul Theroux
#53. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Victor Hugo
#54. A multichild household is a pit of petty jealousies, this I knew, and the Nash children were panicking at the idea of competing not just with one another, but with a dead sister. They had my sympathies.
Gillian Flynn
#55. 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
#56. Right now, American law bars the admission of aliens suspected of terrorist activity - but not of terrorist sympathies.
Richard Perle
#57. 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
#58. The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.
George Stillman Hillard
#59. Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.
Richard Ford
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
William James
#63. When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
Sara Zarr
#64. Sympathy for the enemy
a weakness of police and armies alike. Most perilous are the unconscious sympathies directing you to preserve your enemy intact because the enemy is your justification for existence.
Frank Herbert
#65. To us, our house was not unsentient matter
it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction.
Mark Twain
#66. If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.
George Eliot
#67. 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
#68. There are secret ties, there are sympathies, by the sweet relationship of which souls that are well matched attach themselves to each other, and are affected by I know not what, which cannot be explained
Pierre Corneille
#69. Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.
B. R. Hayden
#70. Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but for instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#72. Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.
Frances E. Willard
#73. Pilate deserves our sympathies, not because he was a good though tragically mistaken man, but because we are not much better. We may believe in Jesus, but we do not believe in his ideas, at least not his ideas about violence, truth, and justice.2
Brian Zahnd
#74. David Halberstam often wrote about the powerful, but his real sympathies lay with ordinary people. He was very uncomfortable with bigfoot Washington journalism - he thought it was lazy and self-serving.
Jonathan Yardley
#75. 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
#77. My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.
Joyce Carol Oates
#78. 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
#79. Instead he gave Cabal his most professional pat on the shoulder. It was his best pat, the one that said, You have my most sincere albeit non-specific sympathies. It was all he could do.
Jonathan L. Howard
#80. Boredom is a sign of satisfied ignorance, blunted apprehension, crass sympathies, dull understanding, feeble powers of attention, and irreclaimable weakness of character.
James Bridie
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
James A. Baldwin
#84. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
Oscar Wilde
#85. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies ... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.
George Eliot
#86. People talk of natural sympathies ; I have heard of good genii ; there are grains of truth in the wildest fable.
Charlotte Bronte
#87. Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface.
James Russell Lowell
#88. We need to broaden our sympathies both in space and time - and perceive ourselves as part of a long heritage, and stewards for an immense future.
Martin Rees
#89. Holocaust deniers always have anti-Semitic beliefs and sympathies somewhere inside them. Always.
James Morcan
#90. The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
Henry Adams
#91. Sport hunting is a crime. My sympathies are with the fox.
Wallis Simpson
#92. 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
#93. She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.
D.H. Lawrence
#94. In one's own home it is as if little, innate sympathies draw one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one in an embrace, or take one along particular streets that seem friendly when others may be hostile. And, believe me, that feeling is a very important part of life.
Ford Madox Ford
#95. In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.
Jessamyn West
#96. How are you to get up the sympathies of the audience in a legitimate manner, if there isn't a little man contending against a big one?
Charles Dickens
#97. The understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited.
Evelyn Waugh
#98. The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
James Anthony Froude
#99. I have no commiseration for princes. My sympathies are reserved for the great mass of mankind ... .
Henry Clay
#100. The existing principle of selfish interest and competition has been carried to its extreme point; and, in its progress, has isolated the heart of man, blunted the edge of his finest sensibilities, and annihilated all his most generous impulses and sympathies.
Frances Wright
