Life & Wisdom Quote by Leigh Hunt

Hunt’s line cuts with the elegance of a parlor insult: it collapses the moral distance between the tenderhearted and the self-absorbed by pointing to their shared stage property - tears. The trick is that he doesn’t deny sympathy; he questions its clean halo. In a culture that prized “sensibility” (and loved to display it), crying could signal virtue, refinement, even political feeling. Hunt, a Romantic-era poet with a journalist’s nose for hypocrisy, knows how easily that display curdles into performance.

The intent is less to sneer at empathy than to warn that emotion is not evidence. Tears are a bodily fact, not a moral credential. A sympathetic person cries because another’s pain breaches their boundaries; a selfish person cries because reality refuses to bend to their desires. Same output, opposite wiring. Hunt makes them “alike” not to equate their motives, but to puncture the common assumption that visible feeling guarantees goodness.

The subtext is almost diagnostic: watch what the tears orbit. Are they pulled toward the sufferer, or toward the self as protagonist? By yoking “sympathizing” to “selfish” in one breath, he also hints at an uncomfortable overlap: compassion can contain a private pleasure in being the one who feels so deeply; selfishness can borrow the aesthetics of sorrow to recruit comfort, attention, absolution.

In the early 19th century, when public sentiment powered reform campaigns and literary culture traded in refined feeling, Hunt’s aphorism lands as a corrective. It’s a reminder to judge character by what emotion does next - not by how wet the eyes get.