Sympathy (n.) that has no outlet becomes a torment that consumes the soul: as dreadful as suffocation, like dew that evaporates over the ocean before reaching the flower, or milk in the breast with no babe.
Sympathy (n.) from the one who broke it off — he sorrows a little over the poor girl, really! — is courtesy carried too far, condolence that only increases the pain.
Sympathy (n.) through the medium of sadness is the only kind the melancholy man can feel for childlike happiness — and it manifests precisely the contradiction.
Sympathy (n.) is cheap in Christendom: each year at the sermon on the ten lepers, the priest swears he too has felt like a leper — but when typhus comes...
Sympathy (n.) unmans the man who suffers his own pain like a lion: in his own pain he knows where he is and plants signposts; in another's he goes astray, cannot trust any consolation, and must keep imagining something more dreadful.
Sympathy (n.) is not a banknote that no village can change, but Fortunatus's shilling: one gives it out whole and has it whole still — convert it into change and the magic vanishes.
Sympathy (n.) awakens most powerfully in the victor: while one fights one forgets what sympathy enjoins; when one has conquered it commonly awakens.
Sympathy (n.) that lacks love betrays itself by its fruits: bitter mockery, shrewd reasoning, poisonous mistrust, the cutting coldness of the man who has ceased to sorrow.
Sympathy (n.) reaches its comic height in the Leipzig society that, pitying the sad fate of old horses, pledged to eat their flesh.
Sympathy (n.) is the most undisciplined passion: for its sake one rises like a thief in the night and risks everything.
Sympathy (n.) comes only from the same wound: only one bitten by a serpent knows what another serpent-bitten man suffers.
Sympathy (n.) felt by the experimenter is perhaps pure — sympathy for his experiment.
Sympathy (n.) is true only when you admit, deeply, that what has happened to one human being can happen to all; the cowardly kind that thanks God it is not like that person is treason against God and oneself.
Sympathy (n.) as usually meant is the most paltry of all social accomplishments — not a good to the sufferer but a way of protecting one's own egotism.
Sympathy (n.) as the silly participation in others' weal and woe is honored by that name but is in fact nothing but vanity.
Sympathy (n.) that cannot bear to refuse a fevered man water, and so prescribes cold water out of pity, kills him out of pity.
Sympathy (n.) abandons the most miserable for its own sake, not daring to come near, wishing to stay unaware that such misery can befall anyone.
Sympathy (n.) can ruin enthusiasm while seeming so soothing, and must sometimes be refused at the cost of being misunderstood.
Sympathy (n.) presses so close that the grieving flinch from it almost as from the pain; nature offers sympathy at a soothing distance, there and yet not there.