Sympathetic Quotes - Page 3

• Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space.

  Camille Paglia

  Cutting, Epic, Space

  "The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age". Arion Vol. 11, no 3, Spring 2004.

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• Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Worry, Suffering, Nihilism

  Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.392, Simon and Schuster

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• This is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and spirit. To see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature, and make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.

  Mark Twain

  Dream, Nature, Eye

  Mark Twain (2012). “Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1, Reader’s Edition”, p.76, Univ of California Press

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• To be a healthy person, you have to be sympathetic to the child you once were and maintain the continuity between you as a child and you as an adult.

  Maurice Sendak

  Children, Healthy, Adults

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• There is a celestial mind-force, a great sympathetic force which is life itself, of which everything is composed.

  John Ernst Worrell Keely

  Life, Mind, Consciousness

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• We don't want sympathetic liberals, we want gays to represent gays... I represent the gay street people-the 14-year-old runaway from San Antonio. We have to make up for hundreds of years of persecution. We have to give hope to that poor runaway kid from San Antonio. They go to the bars because churches are hostile. They need hope! They need a piece of the pie!

  Harvey Milk

  Kids, Gay, Years

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• Modern photography must do more than entertain, it must incite thought and by its clear statements of actuality, cultivate a sympathetic understanding of men and women and the life they live and create.

  Max Dupain

  Photography, Men, Understanding

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• Digestion is quickly shut down during stress…The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Stress, Perfect, Digestion

  "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping - Now Revised and Updated".

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• Above all, there was Almah. Everything combined to make her most dear to me. My life has been such that I never before had seen anyone whome I loved; and here Almah was the one congenial and sympathetic, and I loved her dearly, even before I understood what my feelings were. One day I learned all, and found that she was more precious to me than all the world.

  James De Mille

  Feelings, One Day, World

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• My mother was very sympathetic. She was the one who really gave me the courage to take my freedom.

  Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

  Mother, Mentor

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• It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair
  life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally
  getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.

  Robert Wyatt

  Happiness, Musician, Relief

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• It is at a time like this, when crisis threatens the stomach, that the French display the most sympathetic side of their nature. Tell them stories of physical injury or financial ruin and they will either laugh or commiserate politely. But tell them you are facing gastronomic hardship, and they will move heaven and earth and even restaurant tables to help you.

  Peter Mayle

  Moving, Laughing, Heaven

  FaceBook post by Peter Mayle from Nov 25, 2015

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• It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.

  Jennifer Niven

  Hurt, People, Wish

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• The affiliation clause in our Constitution is a privilege: a courtesy to a sympathetic body. Were you not a Mason, or Co-Mason, you would have to be proposed and seconded, and then examined by savage Inquisitors, and then-probably-thrown out on the garbage heap. Well, no, it's not as bad as that; but we certainly don't want anybody who chooses to apply. Would you do it yourself, if you were on the Committee of a Club? The O.T.O. is a serious body, engaged on a work of Cosmic scope. You should question yourself: what can I contribute?

  Aleister Crowley

  Privilege, Serious, Savages

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• It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

  Mary Oliver

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.116, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.

  Adam Smith

  Fall, Passion, Empathy

  Adam Smith, James R. Otteson (2004). “Adam Smith: Selected Philosophical Writings”, p.22, Imprint Academic

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• Exploring Ecclesiology is true to its subtitle, being both vibrantly evangelical and admirably ecumenical; it is commendable for its depth, breadth, and erudition. Harper and Metzger's sympathetic engagement with Catholic ecclesiology is challenging and reciprocal. I especially appreciate how the authors emphasize and explore the vital connection between ecclesiology and eschatology, something very beneficial to readers seeking to better appreciate how living the Faith in community today relates to the hope of entering fully into Trinitarian communion in the life to come.

  Carl E. Olson

  Appreciate, Community, Catholic

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• Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it. So if, from perhaps some unhealthy desire for sympathetic support, you describe your life in negative terms you will find that this will reinforce your mind's negative emotions and make you unhappy and even more susceptible to feeling unhappy in the future. By simply doing the reverse and focusing on why you are lucky and grateful things are not worse, you will strengthen and increase your mind's positive emotions and make yourself happy and even more likely to feel happy in the future.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Gratitude, Grateful, Support You

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• Like many others, I'm deeply sympathetic to the huge numbers of people looking to come here today to escape suffering and poverty in their own lands. But as a country, we cannot afford to have a total open-door policy without any restrictions on entry.

  Ed Koch

  Country, Doors, Land

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• I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment."

  Joshua Ferris

  Book, Character, Emotional

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II. After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II? Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks - and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well - because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.

  Adam Hochschild

  Military, War, Airplane

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

  David Byrne

  Song, Believe, Design

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• Of course we can talk about the radical potential of youth. But in the U.S. it is still the case that most youth are conservative and not very sympathetic to the working class.

  Michael Yates

  Class, Conservative, Youth

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration

  Philip Roth

  Drawing, Yesterday, People

  Philip Roth (1997). “American Pastoral”, p.74, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I suppose I'll be remembered as dull. Timid. No one ever knew me. People came. They went. I was kind, I think. Not sympathetic, but considerate of others. I always gave up my place in line. I loaned out pencils and paper, or let people take them from me. I never reported a sexual assault.

  Julie Anne Peters

  Thinking, People, Paper

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