150 Sympathy Quotes to Illuminate the Path of Empathy

Sympathy refers to the feelings of compassion, sorrow, or pity for the suffering, hardships, or misfortunes of others. It involves the ability to understand and share the feelings of someone else who is going through a difficult situation. Sympathy is often expressed through gestures, words, or actions that convey support and understanding, and it reflects a sense of empathy and concern for the well-being of others. It is different from empathy, which involves personally experiencing and sharing the emotions of another person. Sympathy is a form of emotional support and connection that fosters a sense of solidarity and kindness in human relationships.

Sympathy Quotes

1. “I know for certain that we never lose the people we love, even to death. They continue to participate in every act, thought, and decision we make. Their love leaves an indelible imprint in our memories. We find comfort in knowing that our lives have been enriched by having shared their love.”
— Leo Buscaglia

2. “And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
— Khalil Gibran

3. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
— Aeschylus

4. “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”
— Washington Irving

5. “Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart.”
— Bruce Coville

6. “May tender memories soften your grief, May fond recollection bring you relief, And may you find comfort and peace in the thought Of the joy that knowing your loved one brought… For time and space can never divide Or keep your loved one from your side. When memory paints in colors true, the happy hours that belonged to you.”
— Helen Steiner Rice

7. “Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in times of sorrow.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson

8. “Words cannot ease the pain you are feeling right now But just wanted to let you know that we are thinking about you And praying for your pain to ease And for you to find sunshine when the dark clouds have passed.”
— Margaret Jones

9. “Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.”
— Rossiter W. Raymond

10. “Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room, I shall be able to see.”
— Helen Keller

11. “Both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.”
— Jesse Jackson

12. “Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”
— Meister Eckhart

13. “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”
— George Eliot

14. “What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.”
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich

15. “Each small task of everyday life is part of the total harmony of the universe.”
— Therese of Lisieux

16. “Until one has loved an animal a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”
— Anatole France

17. “The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love, and to be greater than our suffering.”
— Ben Okri

18. “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power.”
— Washington Irving

19. “Tears are God’s gift to us. Our holy water. They heal us as they flow.”
— Rita Schiano

20. “We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.”
— Kenji Miyazawa

21. “One of the greatest of all mental pleasures is to have our thoughts often divined: ever entered into with sympathy.”
— Letitia Elizabeth Landon

22. “They that love beyond the world
cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies.”
— William Penn

23. “Men are often biased in their judgment on account of their sympathy and their interests.”
— George W. Norris

24. “He spoke well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.”
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

25. “He kept at true good humor’s mark The social flow of pleasure’s tide: He never made a brow look dark, Nor caused a tear, but when he died.”
— Thomas Love Peacock

26. “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”
— George S. Patton

27. “In the night of death, Hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.”
— Robert Green Ingersoll

28. “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.”
— Lord Byron

29. “If thou art something bring thy soul and interchange with mine. – Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.”
— Friedrich Schiller

30. “A sympathy in choice.”
— William Shakespeare

31. “The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

32. “Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.”
— Henri Frederic Amiel

33. “Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.”
— Ben Elton

34. “Hurt people hurt people. That’s how pain patterns get passed on, generation after generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future.”
— Yehuda Berg

35. “Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”
— Oscar Wilde

36. “The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.”
— John Ruskin

37. “There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.”
— Dante Alighieri

38. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”
— William Shakespeare

39. “Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

40. “When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy-hearted into which our grief has given us entrance. And inevitably, we will feel about us their arms, their sympathy and their understanding.”
— Helen Keller

41. “We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
— Henry Melvill

42. “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”
— Khalil Gibran

43. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”
— Helen Keller

44. “The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

45. “Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

46. “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.”
— Corrie Ten Boom

47. “For some moments in life there are no words.”
— David Seltzer

48. “If we wait until our lives are free from sorrow or difficulty, then we wait forever. And miss the entire point.”
— Dirk Benedict

49. “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
— Isaac Asimov

50. “Tears will get you sympathy, sweat will get you change.”
— Jesse Jackson

51. “There is no death, only a change of worlds.”
— Chief Seattle

52. “Next to love, Sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.”
— Edmund Burke

53. “Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.”
— Julie Burchill

54. “It is not length of life, but depth of life.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

55. “Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I’ll remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me at all.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

56. “For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.”
— William Penn

57. “And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.”
— John Henry Newman

58. “Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

59. “Never elated while one man’s oppressed.”
Never dejected while another’s blessed.
— Alexander Pope

60. “Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.”
— Charles Henry Parkhurst

61. “Compassion is an action word with no boundaries.”
— Prince

62. “Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.”
— Roger Caras

63. “Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”
— Emily Dickinson

64. “The truest end of life is to know the life that never ends.”
— William Penn

65. “Death is the most blessed dream.”
— Georg Buchner

66. “The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.”
— Albert Schweitzer

67. “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
— Harriet Beecher Stowe

68. “Grief is the price we pay for love.”
— Queen Elizabeth II

69. “Sympathetic people often don’t communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.”
— George Eliot

70. “All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.”
— Helen Keller

71. “Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

72. “Sympathy does not think. It acts. It acts to remove. The ceaseless sufferings. Of the world.”
— Sri Chinmoy

73. “A human life is a story told by God.”
— Hans Christian Andersen

74. “A heart at leisure from itself, To soothe and sympathize
— Anna Laetitia Waring

75. “Good-night! Goodnight! as we so oft have said Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days That are no more, and shall no more return. Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed; I stay a little longer, as one stays To cover up the embers that still burn.”
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

76. “His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be.”
— Oscar Wilde

77. “If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.”
— Oscar Wilde

78. “There is in souls a sympathy with sounds.”
— William Cowper

79. “Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.”
— Thomas Moore

80. “Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence, we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.”
— Rachel Naomi Remen

81. “Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples, and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.”
— William Martin

82. “Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with social instincts which in us would be called moral.”
— Charles Darwin

83. “The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.”
— Catharine Beecher

84. “What my tongue dares not that my heart shall say.”
— William Shakespeare

85. “There is no reconciliation until you recognize the dignity of the other until you see their view- you have to enter into the pain of the people. You’ve got to feel their need.”
— John M. Perkins

86. “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.”
— George Washington Carver

87. “Don’t be afraid of showing affection. Be warm and tender, thoughtful and affectionate. Men are more helped by sympathy than by service. Love is more than money, and a kind word will give more pleasure than a present.”
— John Lubbock

88. “The sympathy of most people consists of a mixture of good humor, curiosity, and self-importance.”
— Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

89. “He watched and wept and prayed and felt for all.”
— Oliver Goldsmith

90. “Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive.”
— Charlotte Bronte

91. “Sympathy has to be the first and foremost thing in one’s life,
sympathy and the feeling of oneness.
There cannot be anything greater than the feeling of oneness.”
— Sri Chinmoy

92. “The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.”
— Nicholson Baker

93. “Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it.”
— William Hazlitt

94. “To rejoice in another’s prosperity is to give content to your lot; to mitigate another’s grief is to alleviate or dispel your own.”
— Tryon Edwards

95. “Not being untutored in suffering, I learn to pity those in affliction.”
— Virgil

96. “You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.”
— Max Beerbohm

97. “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.”
— Henry Ward Beecher

98. “We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.”
— Davy Crockett

99. “September did not want to feel for the Marquess. That’s how villains get you, she knew. You feel badly for them, and next thing you know, you’re tied to train tracks. But her wild, untried heart opened up another bloom inside her, a dark branch heavy with fruit.”
— Catherynne M. Valente

100. “Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.”
— Florence Nightingale

101. “Sympathizing and selfish people are alike, both given to tears.”
— Leigh Hunt

102. “Accordingly, death is a harbor of peace for the just but is believed a shipwreck for the wicked.”
— Ambrose

103. “Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.”
— Herman Melville

104. “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.”
— Octavius Winslow

105. “Could I tell them I was sorry their loved one was dead when he’d tried to kill me? There was no rule of etiquette for this; even my grandmother would have been stymied.”
— Charlaine Harris

106. “There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.”
— George Santayana

107. “I ask Thee for a thankful love,
Through constant watching wise,
To meet the glad with joyful smiles,
And to wipe the weeping eyes,
And a heart at leisure from itself,
To soothe and sympathize.”
— Anna Laetitia Waring

108. “When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.”
— George MacDonald

109. “It is a man’s sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.”
— Albert Schweitzer

110. “He bit his lip in a manner that immediately awakened my maternal sympathy, and I helped him bite it.”
— S. J. Perelman

111. “We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy but by direct intercourse and sympathy.”
— Richard M. Nixon

112. “The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.”
— Hermann Hesse

113. “Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.”
— P. J. O’Rourke

114. “But what you could perhaps do with in these days is a word of most sincere sympathy. Your movement is carried internally by so strong a truth and necessity that victory in one form or another cannot elude you for long.”
— Hjalmar Schacht

115. “I have a lot of sympathy for young people because I realize how disturbed I was. How would I deal with life in the future? What would I do for a living?”
— Clyde Tombaugh

116. “California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?”
— Denis Kearney

117. “I can hardly express in words my deep feeling and sympathy for them, knowing as I do, the many serious handicaps and obstacles that will confront them in almost every walk of life.”
— Major Taylor

118. “It is the right of our people to organize to oppose any law and any part of the Constitution with which they are not in sympathy.”
— Al Smith

119. “The light has gone out of my life.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

120. “It’s hard for me to think of others because I’m not, particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.”
— Alan Hovhaness

121. “The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”
— William James

122. “We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

123. “Any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy, which qualifies life for immortality.”
— George William Russell

102. “It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.”
— Henry David Thoreau

124. “There’s no greater way to gain an audience’s sympathy than by being unfortunate.”
— Seth Green

125. “Since this war began our sympathy has gone out to all the suffering people who have been dragged into it. Further, hundreds of millions have become involved since I spoke at Limerick a fortnight ago.”
— Eamon de Valera

126. “Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, and forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”
— Mother Teresa

127. “I joined the Party definitely in 1923 after having already been in sympathy with it before.”
— Fritz Sauckel

128. “September 11th was a moment when America had the sympathy of the world.”
— Tom Ford

129. “The man who melts With social sympathy, though not allied, Is more worth than a thousand kinsmen.”
— Euripides

130. “We pine for kindred natures To mingle with our own.”
— Felicia Hemans

131. “For thou hast given me in this beauteous face A world of earthly blessings to my soul, If sympathy of love unite our thoughts.”
— William Shakespeare

132. “Pity and need to Make all flesh kin. There in no caste in blood.”
— Edwin Arnold

133. “For grief is crowned with consolation.”
— William Shakespeare

134. “Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy, and mutual valuing.”
— Rollo May

135. “Sympathy is something that shouldn’t be bestowed on the Yankees. Apparently, it angers them.”
— Bob Feller

136. “Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains.”
— Khalil Gibran

137. “All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

138. “Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.”
— Thomas Carlyle

139. “It is the will of God and Nature that these mortal bodies be laid aside when the soul is to enter into real life; ’tis rather an embryo state, a preparation for living; a man is not completely born until he be dead: Why then should we grieve that a new child is born among the immortals?”
— Benjamin Franklin

140. “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
— C. S. Lewis

141. “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”
— Helen Keller

142. “It is certain my belief gains quite infinitely the very moment I can convince another mind thereof.”
— Novalis

143. “Seldom in the business and transactions of ordinary life, do we find the sympathy we want.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

144. “Each of the world religions has its own particular genius, its own special insight into the nature and requirements of compassion, and has something unique to teach us.”
— Karen Armstrong

145. “It is a lively spark of nobleness to descend in most favor to one when he is lowest in affliction.”
— Philip Sidney

146. “To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.”
— Ivan Turgenev

147. “Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath, and a glass of wine.”
— Thomas Aquinas

148. “We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.”
— Confucius

149. “Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.”
— Oscar Wilde

150. “To be in one’s own heart in kindly sympathy with all things; this is the nature of righteousness.”
— Confucius