Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Sympathy
Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength not my weakness.
Amos Bronson Alcott—Table-Talk. Sympathy.
Pity and need
Make all flesh kin. There is no caste in blood.
Edwin Arnold—Light of Asia. Bk. VI. L. 73.
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?
John Bright—Speech on Slavery and Secession. Feb. 3, 1863.
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.
Byron—Stanzas to Augusta.
Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Carlyle—Essays. Goethe’s Works.
There is in souls a sympathy with sounds.
Cowper—The Task. Bk. VI. L. 1.
Jobling, there are chords in the human mind.
Dickens—Bleak House. Ch. XX.
Our souls sit close and silently within,
And their own web from their own entrails spin;
And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such,
That, spider like, we feel the tenderest touch.
Dryden—Mariage à la Mode. Act II. Sc. 1.
The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.
Emerson—Representative Men. Montaigne.
The man who melts
With social sympathy, though not allied,
Is of more worth than a thousand kinsmen.
Euripides—Orestes. L. 846.
He watch’d and wept, he pray’d and felt for all.
Goldsmith—The Deserted Village. L. 166.
The craving for sympathy is the common boundary-line between joy and sorrow.
J. C. and A. W. Hare—Guesses at Truth.
We pine for kindred natures
To mingle with our own.
Felicia D. Hemans—Psyche borne by Zephyrs to the Island of Pleasure.
Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow
For other’s good, and melt at other’s woe.
Homer—Odyssey. Bk. XVIII. L. 269. Pope’s trans.
Bowels of compassion.
I John. III. 17.
World-wide apart, and yet akin,
As showing that the human heart
Beats on forever as of old.
Longfellow—Tales of a Wayside Inn. Pt. III. The Theologian’s Tale. Interlude.
For I no sooner in my heart divin’d,
My heart, which by a secret harmony
Still moves with thine, joined in connection sweet.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. X. L. 357.
Never elated while one man’s oppress’d;
Never dejected while another’s blessed.
Pope—Essay on Man. Ep. IV. L. 323.
Somewhere or other there must surely be
The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet—never yet—ah me!
Made answer to my word.
Christina G. Rossetti—Somewhere or Other.
If thou art something bring thy soul and interchange with mine.
Schiller—Votive Tablets. Value and Worth.
It [true love] is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind
In body and in soul can bind.
Scott—Lay of the Last Minstrel. Canto V. St. 13.
For thou hast given me in this beauteous face,
A world of earthly blessings to my soul,
If sympathy of love unite our thoughts.
Henry VI. Pt. II. Act I. Sc. 1. L. 21.
A sympathy in choice.
Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act I. Sc. 1. L. 141.
A heart at leisure from itself,
To soothe and sympathise.
Anna L. Waring—Father I know that all my Life.