... to the church office reiterating a tale of woe about being evicted unfairly by a landlord. It turns out this happened years ago and the person became so fixated on the injustice of the event that wandering from place to place trying to win sympathy and help has become a permanant lifestyle. When the Pope visited Canada, one newscast showed two young girls sobbing with intense emotion as "the Holy Father" touched and kissed them. Whether it is the Pope, Michael Jackson or the Beatles, how many people have ...
... gives us our sense of what is fair or unfair. Our feeling of compassion for the afflicted is a reflection of the compassion God feels in response to suffering. God's anger works through us when we respond to life's unfairness with sympathy and positive action. Of course, sometimes our righteous indignation can be misguided or misplaced. It may have been psychologically healthy for the Israelites to express their tremendous anger toward the Babylonians in Psalm 137 - "Happy shall be he who takes your babies ...
When men are arrested without any legal basis and for political reasons, it's merely a routine, everyday occurrence in Russia, and hardly anyone has any sympathy.
The way to make a true friend is to be one. Friendship implies loyalty, esteem, cordiality, sympathy, affection, readiness to aid, to help, to stick, to fight for, if need be. Radiate friendship and it will return sevenfold.
Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.
Orthodox criticism . . . is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.
I have the greatest sympathy with the growth of the socialist party. I think they understand the evils that surround us and hammer them into people's minds better than we Liberals.
I believe that we must reach our brother, never toning down our fundamental oppositions, but meeting him when he asks to be met, with a reason for the faith that is in us, as well as with a loving sympathy for them as brothers.
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.