Quotes From "Sympathy" By Olivia Sudjic

When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death. Clarence Darrow

Take lightly what you hear about individuals. We need not distort trust for our paltry little political agendas. We tend to trust soulless, carried information more than we trust soulful human beings; but really most people aren't so bad once you sit down and have an honest, one-on-one conversation with them, once, with an open heart, you listen to their explanations as to why they act the way they act, or say what they say, or do what they do. Criss Jami

I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear. Olivia Sudjic

For those constantly full of joy, they sometimes feel a little guilty for always feeling so good. That guilt is compassion: it flies in with an attempt to share one's joy with others who do not have it. Criss Jami

I became convinced that I was being watched. Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuko rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last–after everything and everyone else has escaped. Olivia Sudjic

Before I lost my father, I never understood the rituals surrounding funerals: the wake, the service itself, the reception afterward, the dinners prepared by well-meaning friends and delivered in plastic containers, even the popular habit of making poster boards filled with photos of the dear departed. But now I know why we do those things. It's busywork, all of it. I had so much to take care of, so many arrangements to make, so many people to inform, I didn't have a moment to be engulfed by the ocean of grief that was lapping at my heels. Instead, I waded through the shallows, performing task after task, grateful to have duties to propel me forward. Wendy Webb

Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism. Unknown

A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. Albert Einstein

Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while. Olivia Sudjic

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable–namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. Charles Darwin

On my journey from the fantastical to the practical, spirituality has gone from being a mystical experience to something very ordinary and a daily experience. Many don’t want this, instead they prefer spiritual grandeur, and I believe that is what keeps enlightenment at bay. We want big revelations of complexity that validates our perceptions of the divine. What a let down it was to Moses when God spoke through a burning bush! But that is exactly the simplicity of it all. Our spiritual life is our ordinary life and it is very grounded in every day experience. For me, it is the daily practice of kindness, mindfulness, happiness, and peace. Alaric Hutchinson

The gut is the seat of all feeling. Polluting the gut not only cripples your immune system, but also destroys your sense of empathy, the ability to identify with other humans. Bad bacteria in the gut creates neurological issues. Autism can be cured by detoxifying the bellies of young children. People who think that feelings come from the heart are wrong. The gut is where you feel the loss of a loved one first. It's where you feel pain and a heavy bulk of your emotions. It's the central base of your entire immune system. If your gut is loaded with negative bacteria, it affects your mind. Your heart is the seat of your conscience. If your mind is corrupted, it affects your conscience. The heart is the Sun. The gut is the Moon. The pineal gland is Neptune, and your brain and nervous system (5 senses) are Mercury. What affects the moon or sun affects the entire universe within. So, if you poison the gut, it affects your entire nervous system, your sense of reasoning, and your senses. . Suzy Kassem

Look at that crowd', he said disgustedly. 'They think it's a circus.'' And not a single coin are they donating', said Dina.'That's not surprising. Pity can only be shown in small doses. When so many beggars are in one place, the public goes like this' - he put his fists to his eyes, like binoculars. Rohinton Mistry

That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet–the feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of any of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I leant against. Olivia Sudjic

The mark of man is initiative, but the mark of woman is cooperation. Man talks about freedom; woman about sympathy, love, sacrifice. Man cooperates with nature; woman cooperates with God. Man was called to till the earth, to "rule over the earth"; woman to be the bearer of a life that comes from God. Fulton J. Sheen

For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom. Stefan Zweig

Bottled, was he?" Said Colonel Bantry, with an Englishman's sympathy for alcoholic excess. "Oh, well, can't judge a fellow by what he does when he's drunk? When I was at Cambridge, I remember I put a certain utensil - well - well, nevermind. Agatha Christie

I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian — I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party. Phillip Adams

You can’t save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don’t appreciate your interfering with the drama they’ve created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don’t want to change. Sue Grafton

If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally. George Eliot

Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence. Germaine Greer

Such actions are beyond praise: it is the perfume of such sweet and noble human sympathy that makes this wild beasts' cage a world habitable for men. Frank Harris

I felt sad. I felt cold. I felt hurt. I felt forsaken and lonely. I felt doubtful and hesitant. I felt scared and deeply worried. I felt different, unknown, and unwelcome. I felt empty and woefully neglected. I felt weak and intimidated. I felt withdrawn and shy. I felt utterly hopeless. Then you held my hand, and I felt better. Richelle E. Goodrich

I cannot live my life striving only for my own security, I can only feel secure when I see myself useful in other people's life. Nurudeen Ushawu

It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us. J.M. Coetzee

Your world is just as empty as your heart! Cass Van Krah

If you want to know how negative you are, pay attention to how much you hate negativity in other people. Fragile, artificial positivity needs always to be surrounded by more positivity in order to stay positive, but the ability to be positive, happy, and even, at times, appreciative around 'negative people' is the mark of real positivity. Criss Jami

Speaking a painful truth should be done only in love - like wielding a sword with no hilt - it should pain oneself in direct proportion to the amount of force exerted. Criss Jami

The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy. Olivia Sudjic

We are born with the innate capacity to express empathy. Experiencing our own cuts and bruises, encountering our own difficulties and disappointments, expands our cognitive world and rouses the universal desire to understand and comfort other people in pain. Kilroy J. Oldster

One's suffering, one's melancholy is, in itself, really only looked upon as failure or as punishment, as detestable or sinful or socially unacceptable in the eyes of man; but this is not so in the eyes of God: for He is close to the broken-hearted. Criss Jami

We are, or rather our natural desire to evade pain and to attain pleasure is, the primary reason we do or say every single thing we do or say. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In many cases, it was the woman’s stomach–not her heart–that fell for her man. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In some cases, it is the woman’s stomach–not her heart–that has left her man for another. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds: And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave; Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies. William Cowper

*Prostitution* is a euphemism for rape incidents that the victim and the economy profits from. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Be willing to give, but only when you aren't expecting anything in return. Criss Jami

When it comes to moral dilemmas and matters of discerning right justice, my natural sympathy so often happens to land on the opposite end of that of most of my peers. I sometimes wonder if this is nothing more than the misguidedness and the wickedness of my own heart. I wonder other times if God wires some of us in such a way so that fair discourse might then be provided, so that honest and unbiased, due process is ultimately more likely to be carried out. Perhaps it is all necessary for variance of perception, for mindful debate: that the heart is meant to create a bit of bias on certain issues; as between one another, they weigh and balance. For not all hearts are the same. Criss Jami

The funny thing about the heart is a soft heart is a strong heart, and a hard heart is a weak heart. Criss Jami

If you truly have compassion in your heart, show it by keeping your doubts to yourself and sharing your hope with those who love change! Israelmore Ayivor

Lingering, bottled-up anger never reveals the 'true colors' of an individual. It, on the contrary, becomes all mixed up, rotten, confused, forms a highly combustible, chemical compound then explodes as something foreign, something very different than one's natural self. Criss Jami

The graveyard is the everlasting home of every man. Lailah Gifty Akita

It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?. Russell Brand

I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth. Criss Jami

Sometimes the heart weakens the individual that makes him/her do things he/she wouldn't normally do. Following ones heart varies by situations, but should never be followed when making decisions on critical situations. The heart is full of love and compassion thus welling to forgive, show mercy, and weakens the mind of the individual. So, be passionate of your performance and sympathize and empathize with sensitive situations, but let your mind guide your heart. . Unknown

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. Wilkie Collins

Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck. Dennis Lehane

The real test of love is loving those who we feel are the hardest ones to love. Criss Jami

I do not believe it possible for one to genuinely love Truth more than people (or vice versa). One might fall into the snare of loving the search more than people, or the pride of having exposed something or someone, but not the truth itself. For if you love Truth you love people; because to love people at all and without illusion, you must also love the truth about them. Criss Jami

A funeral is like a little game, really. You have to just play along and say the right thing and behave the right way until it’s over. Be pleasant but don’t smile too much; be sad but don’t overdo it or the family will feel worse than they already do. Be hopeful but don’t let your optimism be taken as a lack of empathy or an inability to deal with the reality. Because if anybody was to be truly honest there would be a lot of arguments, finger-pointing, tears, snot, and screaming. Cecelia Ahern

The whole time I hadn't slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up. Olivia Sudjic

Have you ever tried to organise a threesome in real life?' I shook my head. I'd only encountered them in porn, but it seemed to happen without much admin, the same way all porn skipped out the granular details of sex, like condoms and kissing, that were supposed to happen in real life. Olivia Sudjic

With mercy and sympathy, no one will hate to love one another. Auliq Ice

When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated, deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered unreasonable, cruel, revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. He had solemnly promised the Jews that he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He had led them to believe that in a little while their troubles would be over, and that they would soon in the land of Canaan, surrounded by their wives and little ones, forget the stripes and tears of Egypt. After promising the poor wanderers again and again that he would lead them in safety to the promised land of joy and plenty, this God, forgetting every promise, said to the wretches in his power:–' Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your carcasses be wasted.' This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death and night faded all the promises of God. Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses were left to rot in the desert, and each one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. I cannot believe these things. They are so cruel and heartless, that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that is equally abhorrent to my head and heart, cannot be accepted as a revelation from God.When we think of the poor Jews, destroyed, murdered, bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, decimated by famine, butchered by each, other, swallowed by the earth, frightened, cursed, starved, deceived, robbed and outraged, how thankful we should be that we are not the chosen people of God. No wonder that they longed for the slavery of Egypt, and remembered with sorrow the unhappy day when they exchanged masters. Compared with Jehovah, Pharaoh was a benefactor, and the tyranny of Egypt was freedom to those who suffered the liberty of God.While reading the Pentateuch, I am filled with indignation, pity and horror. Nothing can be sadder than the history of the starved and frightened wretches who wandered over the desolate crags and sands of wilderness and desert, the prey of famine, sword, and plague. Ignorant and superstitious to the last degree, governed by falsehood, plundered by hypocrisy, they were the sport of priests, and the food of fear. God was their greatest enemy, and death their only friend. It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:–such is the God of the Pentateuch. . Robert G. Ingersoll

When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them. Criss Jami

One either cares what others think about him, or cares what others think he thinks about them. If you want to find someone who doesn't care in the slightest what anyone thinks, try a lunatic asylum. Criss Jami

One thing I don’t needis any more apologiesi got sorry greetin me at my front dooryou can keep yrsi don’t know what to do wit emthey don’t open doorsor bring the sun backthey don’t make me happyor get a mornin paperdidn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash carscuz a sorry. Ntozake Shange

Look for the person everyone hates, and love them. Criss Jami

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege. Thomas Mann

She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was formerly loved–a word for the act of falling out of love. I said I couldn't think of it. It wasn't in the dictionary either, not the one she wanted. Olivia Sudjic

Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained. Olivia Sudjic

The next time you wish you could find the right words to say to someone who is hurting, just remember that dogs are a man's best friend without ever speaking a word to them. Simply be present and have sympathy. Ashly Lorenzana

Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. Wilkie Collins

It has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience. William Styron

An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. Harriet Beecher Stowe

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels. Jeanette Winterson

Born in the East, and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet, and enters land after land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the monarch that he is the servant of the Most High, and into the cottage to assure the peasant that he is the son of God. Children listen to its stories with wonder and delight, and wisemen ponder them as parables of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, the hour of darkness. Its oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wise and the proud tremble at its warnings, but to the wounded and penitent it has a mother's voice. The wilderness and the solitary place have been made glad by it, and the fire on the hearth has lighted the reading of its well-worn pages. It has woven itself into our deepest affections, and colored our dearest dreams; so that love and friendship, sympathy and devotion, memory and hope, put on the beautiful garments of its treasured speech, breathing of frankincense and myrrh. Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us uncalled. They fill our prayers with power larger than we know, and the beauty of them lingers in our ear long after the sermons which they have adorned have been forgotten. They return to us swiftly and quietly, like birds flying from far away. They surprise us with new meanings, like springs of water breaking forth from the mountain beside a long-forgotten path. They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn near the heart. No man is poor or desolate who has this treasure for his own. When the landscape darkens and the trembling pilgrim comes to the valley named the shadow, he is not afraid to enter; he takes the rod and staff of Scripture in his hand; he says to friend and comrade, "Good-by, we shall meet again"; and comforted by that support, he goes toward the lonely pass as one who climbs through darkness into light. . Henry Van Dyke

Why do women waste their time trying to convince their insecure family members and girlfriends that they are beautiful? Self esteem is not a beauty cream that you can rub all over them and see instant results. Instead, convince them they are not stupid. Every intelligent woman knows outward beauty is a nip, tuck, chemical peel or diet away. If you don't like it, fix it. Shannon L. Alder

There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when th sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime. Alexandre Dumas

In some rare cases, a friendship between two people benefits both of them, and what’s more, in some rarer cases, it benefits both of them equally. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I felt ashamed for having judged him so harshly without knowing the real boy. His one offense against me―goaded by Charlie’s bullying character―was easy to forgive. Richelle E. Goodrich

People are already disappointed by their acquaintances, they can not handle anymore hate from stranger, so show some instantaneous kindness and forgiveness to them. Amit Kalantri

A word of consolation may sweetly touch the ear. Now and then a quiet songwill clear the mind of fear. A simple act of kindnesscan ease a load of care. Stories told in memorydiminish all despair. A whispered prayer of comfortdraws angel arms around. Counting blessings, great and small, helps gratitude abound. These acts, all sympathetic, will kindly play their part. But seldom do they dry the tearsshed mutely in the heart. Richelle E. Goodrich

When gorillas smell danger, they run around and call out to the rest of the primates in the jungle to warn them something evil is coming. And when one of their own dies, they mourn for days while beating themselves up in sadness for failing to save that gorilla, even if the cause of death was natural. And when one colony is mourning, their chilling echoes migrate to other colonies – and those neighbors, even if they are territorial rivals, will also grieve with them. When faced with a common danger, rivals turn into allies. And when faced with death, the loss of just one gorilla becomes the loss of the entire jungle. Suzy Kassem

I wasn't offering her pity, " Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. "Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy. Dorothy Gilman

Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad. Olivia Sudjic

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it– I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then. . Olivia Sudjic

Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live.Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence. The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know–all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot. Unknown

I recognized exactly where she was–that state where you’re able to hold it together as long as absolutely no one talks to you or touches you with any amount of sympathy. Jen Nadol

Sometimes all you can do is hug a friend tightly and wish that their pain could be transferred by touch to your own emotional hard drive. Richelle E. Goodrich

I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious. Unknown