For pity melts the mind to love.

For pitee renneth [runneth] soon in gentle herte [heart].

Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.

Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, but God will never.

It is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion; or with any other feeling than regret, and hope, and brotherly commiseration.

Their congratulations and their condolences are equally words of course.

Poverty, want, need, destitution, indigence, penury.

  Is there for honest poverty
  That hings [hangs] his head, and a’ that?

Not to be able to bear poverty is a shameful thing, but not to know how to chase it away by work is a more shameful thing yet.

  Stitch! stitch! stitch! 
  In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
  And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
  Would that its tone could reach the Rich,
  She sang this “Song of the Shirt!”

Poverty is dishonorable, not in itself, but when it is a proof of laziness, intemperance, luxury, and carelessness; whereas in a person that is temperate, industrious, just and valiant, and who uses all his virtues for the public good, it shows a great and lofty mind.

Want is a bitter and hateful good, Because its virtues are not understood; Yet many things, impossible to thought, Have been by need to full perfection brought.

Hundreds would never have known want if they had not first known waste.

  O! reason not the need; our basest beggars
  Are in the poorest thing superfluous: 
  Allow not nature more than nature needs,
  Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.

The Christian inhabitants of Thessaly would be reduced to destitution.

It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest.

  Chill penury repress’d their noble rage,
  And froze the genial current of the soul.

Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.

  Where penury is felt the thought is chain’d,
  And sweet colloquial pleasures are but few.

Regret, compunction, remorse, contrition, penitence, repentance.

Regrets over the past should chasten the future.

He acknowledged his disloyalty to the king with expressions of great compunction.

  Through no disturbance of my soul,
  Or strong compunction in me wrought,
  I supplicate for thy control.

God speaks to our hearts through the voice of remorse.

To err is human; but contrition felt for the crime distinguishes the virtuous from the wicked.