C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Sympathy
Sympathy is especially a Christian duty.
Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.
Of a truth men are mystically united.
A sympathy in choice.
There is in souls a sympathy with sounds.
Kindred weaknesses induce friendships as often as kindred virtues.
What my tongue dares not that my heart shall say.
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
If thou art something, bring thy soul and interchange with mine.
The sympathy of sorrow is stronger than the sympathy of prosperity.
It is only kindred griefs that draw forth our tears, and each weeps really for himself.
Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength not my weakness.
At a certain depth all bosoms communicate, all hearts are one.
The craving for sympathy is the common boundary-line between joy and sorrow.
Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it.
We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility.
True sympathy is beyond what can be seen and touched and reasoned upon.
Not being untutored in suffering, I learn to pity those in affliction.
Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.
The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man.
Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.
He watched and wept and prayed and felt for all.
One man pins me to the wall, while with another I walk among the stars.
Sympathy is the golden key that unlocks the hearts of others.
Ah! thank heaven, travelers find Samaritans as well as Levites on life’s hard way.
Next to love, sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.
And share the inward fragrance of each other’s heart.
A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.
Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life.
Our own cast-off sorrows are not sufficient to constitute sympathy for others.
All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
All powerful souls have kindred with each other.
A brother’s sufferings claim a brother’s pity.
The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.
The more we know, the better we forgive; whoe’er feels deeply, feels for all who live.
Far better one unpurchased heart than glory’s proudest name.
The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe.
To commiserate is sometimes more than to give; for money is external to a man’s self, but he who bestows compassion communicates his own soul.
A helping word to one in trouble is often like a switch on a railroad track—but one inch between wreck and smooth-rolling prosperity.
The greatest pleasures of which the human mind is susceptible are the pleasures of consciousness and sympathy.
One of the greatest of all mental pleasures is to have our thoughts often divined: ever entered into with sympathy.
Women have the genius of charity. A man gives but his gold; a woman adds to it her sympathy.
Nature has concatenated our fortunes and affections together with indissoluble bands of mutual sympathy.
When a man can look upon the simple wild-rose, and feel no pleasure, his taste has been corrupted.
Sympathetic people are often uncommunicative about themselves; they give back reflected images which hide their own depths.
A face which is always serene possesses a mysterious and powerful attraction; sad hearts come to it as to the sun to warm themselves again.
To rejoice in another’s prosperity is to give content to your own lot; to mitigate another’s grief is to alleviate or dispel your own.
It is certain my belief gains quite infinitely the very moment I can convince another mind thereof.
The world has no sympathy with any but positive griefs. It will pity you for what you lose; never for what you lack.
It is an eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that “where one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.”
There is some danger lest there be no real religion in the heart which craves too much daily sympathy.
It is a lively spark of nobleness to descend in most favor to one when he is lowest in affliction.
A marriage or a refusal or a proposal thrills through a whole household of women, and sets their hysterical sympathies at work.
Public feeling now is apt to side with the persecuted, and our modern martyr is full as likely to be smothered with roses as with coals.
True sympathy is putting ourselves in another’s place; and we are moved in proportion to the reality of our imagination.
The sympathy of most people consists of a mixture of good-humor, curiosity, and self-importance.
One common calamity makes men extremely affect each other, though they differ in every other particular.
It seems to me that we become more dear one to the other, in together admiring works of art, which speak to the soul by their true grandeur.
Sympathy is in great degree a result of the mood we are in at the moment; anger forbids the emotion. On the other hand, it is easiest taken on when we are in a state of most absolute self-satisfaction.
Be willing to pity the misery of the stranger! Thou givest to-day thy bread to the poor; to-morrow the poor may give it to thee.
Women have a smile for every joy, a tear for every sorrow, a consolation for every grief, an excuse for every fault, a prayer for every misfortune, and encouragement for every hope.
Outward things don’t give; they draw out. You find in them what you bring to them. A cathedral makes only the devotional feel devotional; scenery refines only the fine-minded.
The capacity of sorrow belongs to our grandeur, and the loftiest of our race are those who have had the profoundest sympathies, because they have had the profoundest sorrows.
Helpless mortal! Thine arm can destroy thousands at once, but cannot enclose even two of thy fellow-creatures at once in the embrace of love and sympathy!
Man is one; and he hath one great heart. It is thus we feel, with a gigantic throb athwart the sea, each other’s rights and wrongs; thus are we men.
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.
Every man rejoices twice when he has a partner of his joy; a friend shares my sorrow and makes it but a moiety, but he swells my joy and makes it double.
There is poetry and there is beauty in real sympathy; but there is more—there is action. The noblest and most powerful form of sympathy is not merely the responsive tear, the echoed sigh, the answering look; it is the embodiment of the sentiment in actual help.
Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.
The most reserved of men, that will not exchange two syllables together in an English coffee-house, should they meet at Ispahan, would drink sherbet and eat a mess of rice together.
He that sympathizes in all the happiness of others perhaps himself enjoys the safest happiness, and he that is warned by all the folly of others has perhaps attained the soundest wisdom.
No man can force the harp of his own individuality into the people’s heart; but every man may play upon the chords of the people’s heart, who draws his inspiration from the people’s instinct.
It may, indeed, be said that sympathy exists in all minds, as Faraday has discovered that magnetism exists in all metals; but a certain temperature is required to develop the hidden property, whether in the metal or the mind.
I would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his Author’s hands; be pleased, he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.
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.
Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling, or universal benevolence.
But there is one thing which we are responsible for, and that is for our sympathies, for the manner in which we regard it, and for the tone in which we discuss it. What shall we say, then, with regard to it? On which side shall we stand?
The 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.
We often do more good by our sympathy than by our labors. A man may lose position, influence, wealth, and even health, and yet live on in comfort, if with resignation; but there is one thing without which life becomes a burden—that is human sympathy.
Conversation augments pleasure and diminishes pain by our having shares in either; for silent woes are greatest, as silent satisfaction least; since sometimes our pleasure would be none but for telling of it, and our grief insupportable but for participation.
Every human feeling is greater and larger than the exciting cause—a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence, and this is deeply implied in music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate expression.
A man may be buoyed up by the efflation of his wild desires to brave any imaginable peril; but he cannot calmly see one he loves braving the same peril; simply because he cannot feel within him that which prompts another. He sees the danger, and feels not the power that is to overcome it.
Sympathy is the first great lesson which man should learn. It will be ill for him if he proceeds no farther; if his emotions are but excited to roll back on his heart, and to be fostered in luxurious quiet. But unless be learns to feel for things in which he has no personal interest he can achieve nothing generous or noble.
There are eyes which need only to look up, to touch every chord of a breast choked by the stifling atmosphere of stiff and stagnant society, and to call forth tones which might become the accompanying music of a life. This gentle transfusion of mind into mind is the secret of sympathy.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
The devil himself would be but a contemptible adversary were he not sure of a correspondent, and a party that held intelligence with him in our own breasts. All the blowing of a fire put under a caldron could never make it boil over, were there not a fullness of water within it.
Let us cherish sympathy. By attention and exercise it may be improved in every man. It prepares the mind for receiving the impressions of virtue; and without it there can be no true politeness. Nothing is more odious than that insensibility which wraps a man up in himself and his own concerns, and prevents his being moved with either the joys or the sorrows of another.
It is by sympathy we enter into the concerns of others, that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy may be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected.
Graceful, particularly in youth, is the tear of sympathy, and the heart that melts at the tale of woe; we should not permit ease and indulgence to contract our affections, and wrap us up in selfish enjoyment. But we should accustom ourselves to think of the distresses of human life, of the solitary cottage, the dying parent, and the weeping orphan. Nor ought we ever to sport with pain and distress in any of our amusements, or treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty.
Happy is the man who has that in his soul which acts upon the dejected as April airs upon violet roots. Gifts from the hand are silver and gold, but the heart gives that which neither silver nor gold can buy. To be full of goodness, full of cheerfulness, full of sympathy, full of helpful hope, causes a man to carry blessings of which he is himself as unconscious as a lamp is of its own shining. Such a one moves on human life as stars move on dark seas to bewildered mariners; as the sun wheels, bringing all the seasons with him from the south.