During times of loss, finding the right words to express sympathy can be challenging. Whether you’re comforting a friend or seeking solace yourself, heartfelt quotes can offer meaning and comfort when emotions run deep. We’ve gathered a collection of 48 carefully selected sympathy quotes to help convey compassion, support, and understanding in moments that matter most.
1. “If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.” - David Sedaris
2. “Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive.” - Charlotte Brontë
3. “None of us can choose where we shall love...” - Susan Kay
4. “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
5. “Cry me a river, build a bridge, and get over it.” - Justin Timberlake
6. “Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.” - Joseph Fort Newton
7. “There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleasedWith melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;Some chord in unison with what we hearIs touch'd within us, and the heart replies.” - William Cowper
8. “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
9. “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.” - Dorothy Thompson
10. “To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.” - Christopher Hitchens
11. “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
12. “Oh, poor, poor fellow!' said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been.” - E. M. Forster
13. “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
14. “Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.” - Charles Henry Parkhurst
15. “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
16. “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
17. “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
18. “We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.” - Napoleon Bonaparte
19. “When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.” - Criss Jami
20. “Like crying wolf, if you keep looking for sympathy as a justification for your actions, you will someday be left standing alone when you really need help.” - Criss Jami
21. “Good works is giving to the poor and the helpless, but divine works is showing them their worth to the One who matters.” - Criss Jami
22. “Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.” - E.M. Forster
23. “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 Goodrich
24. “Even a witch wants sympathy.” - Franny Billingsley
25. “I couldn’t think of anyone I’d ever felt sorry for. There were plenty of kids I was envious of. There were others I achingly admired, but that might simply be another form of jealousy. Then there were those I feared, dreaded. And the worst of them, the man who shamed me. I could see my father’s angry features looming over my mother. I could clearly picture her beside him in his truck, cowering against the door while he belittled and assaulted her. I guess I did know someone I felt sorry for.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
26. “The family came in to select the arrangements they wanted. The woman whose husband had died was struggling dearly to keep her voice intact long enough to place the order. It wasn't long before she broke down. Wendy didn't say a word. She moved from behind the counter to find a chair for the woman. She eased her into it. She sat beside her and let her cry. Quiet, not speaking. She brought tissues when the moment asked for it.The woman's crying slowly came to a stop. She wiped her eyes, and she looked at Wendy. And she smiled. Just a little one. And she said, "Thank you.” - Christian Millman
27. “Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.--"Wanda” - Ouida
28. “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
29. “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
30. “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
31. “I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated” - Christopher Hitchens
32. “I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.” - Criss Jami
33. “Sympathy is why when a man is getting mugged, you let him keep his shirt after you take his life. Funerals are respectable affairs, after all.” - Bauvard
34. “Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction. Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ's love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them.” - Timothy Keller
35. “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
36. “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
37. “If a person's mind is controlled by forces of revenge and jealousy, it cannot express love & sympathy. And even if they show love and sympathy to others it will yield no good result. The thought will not be reflected in love but in hate.” - Virchand Raghavji Gandhi
38. “Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.” - Oscar Wilde
39. “With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.” - Robert Louis Stevenson
40. “Why does finding out someone has pain in their life make you appreciate them more as a human being? Shouldn't we all assume everyone we meet has their own pain?” - Dalya Moon
41. “We never think lightly of those who walk with us on our uphill days.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
42. “It was all conveyed by the nicest, almost indetectably refined blend of sympathy and bitchiness...” - John Wyndham
43. “Act like you care. Pray like you care. Speak, smile, reach out, and live like you care. The point is to make sure those in your life know beyond doubt that you do care.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
44. “You can have all the sympathy in the world," she said, "just don't feel like you have to wrap your life around it.” - Judy Reene Singer
45. “It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.” - Oscar Wilde
46. “Why do humans always look at these things from the wrong perspective? Predators deserve our sympathy, too.” - Beth Fantaskey
47. “I could really use someone else's smile today.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
48. “My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.” - Marilynne Robinson
