For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been” - John Greenleaf Whittier.
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I have loved long since and lost awhile. - John Henry Newman.
The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle. - John Ruskin.
While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil - John Taylor.
Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains - Kahlil Gibran.
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey - Kenji Miyazawa.
The world has no sympathy with any but positive griefs. It will pity you for what you lose; never for what you lack - Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine.
The sympathy of most people consists of a mixture of good-humor, curiosity, and self-importance - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.
It is certain my belief gains quite infinitely the very moment I can convince another mind thereof - Novalis.
He watched and wept and prayed and felt for all - Oliver Goldsmith.
The greatest pleasures of which the human mind is susceptible are the pleasures of consciousness and sympathy - Parke Godwin.
There are secret ties, there are sympathies, by the sweet relationship of which souls that are well matched attach themselves to each other, and are affected by I know not what, which cannot be explained - Pierre Corneille.
One man pins me to the wall, while with another I walk among the stars - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing - Robert Ingersoll.
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 Worthington Raymond.
All powerful souls have kindred with each other - Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
One common calamity makes men extremely affect each other, though they differ in every other particular - Sir Richard Steele.
It is a lively spark of nobleness to descend in most favor to one when he is lowest in affliction - Sir Philip Sidney (Sydney).
Sympathy does not think. It acts. It acts to remove. The ceaseless sufferings. Of the world - Sri Chinmoy.
To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die - Thomas Campbell.
Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one - Thomas Carlyle.
He kept at true good humour’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.
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.
Not being untutored in suffering, I learn to pity those in affliction - Vergil.
Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it - William Hazlitt.
We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility - William Hazlitt.
For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity - William Penn.
A sympathy in choice - William Shakespeare.
What my tongue dares not that my heart shall say - William Shakespeare.
Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin - Yevgeny Yevtushenko.