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.
Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.
'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' β this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to 'Do you like me? Please like me,' which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene.
We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
It seems that, culturally, young people function more in groups. They know each other through digital media. All the young comedy people who work in TV are really used to working at the table with lots of writers around. They're comfortable in the group; they don't assert their own egos over everyone else.
Neither old people nor sour people seem to make friends easily; for there is little that is pleasant in them.
For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being.
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