“I can sympathise with everything, except suffering", cried Lord Harry, Shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathise with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain.”

“There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.”

“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.”

“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.”

“There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.”

“How dreadful!" cried Lord Harry. "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.”

“You are remarkably modern, Mabel. A little too modern, perhaps. Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.”