Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.
Interpretation
True sympathy involves deep personal engagement, unlike superficial pity.
In this quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasizes the difference between mere pity and genuine sympathy. He argues that while pity is often an impersonal act, such as sending a check, true sympathy requires one to invest emotionally and spiritually, demonstrating a deeper personal connection and commitment to others' suffering and needs.
In practice
In a speech about community support, one might say: 'As Martin Luther King, Jr. wisely noted, true sympathy requires deep personal connection.'
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
Music is the best consolation for a despaired man
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
Israel... is one of the great outpost of democracy in the world
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
Look around. And don't get close to people who make you suffer.
A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling that I didn't fully belong, that my parents didn't belong.
You have now reached infatuation’s final destination—the complete and merciless devaluation of self.
If husbands could realize what large returns of profit may be gotten out of a wife by a small word of praise paid over the counter when the market is just right, they would bring matters around the way they wish them much oftener than they usually do. Arguments are unsafe with wives, because they examine them; but they do not examine compliments. One can pass upon a wife a compliment that is three-fourths base
Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone.
The Lakers had been home to me, unlike the home I had grown up and felt apart from.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.