Sympathy & Empathy

I've spent the greater part of the last two days rewatching one of my all-time favourite animes, Last Exile. At one point a minor character says "I sympathize with your pain." Because of the context I understood that to sympathize was to understand how someone felt based on similar experiences. It also reminded me of how I always got sympathy and empathy mixed up but at this point I couldn't really remember what empathy was. Here it is so I, and maybe you single person who randomly comes across this blog in the interwebs, won't forget. As quickly...

Sympathy: 1 a : an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other b : mutual or parallel susceptibility or a condition brought about by it c : unity or harmony in action or effect

Empathy: 1 : the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it 2 : the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this

For any of those tldrers: to empathize is to be able to adopt another person's perspective in order to understand how they come to a particular conclusion or ended up feeling a certain way, while sympathizing involves empathizing and also coming to the same conclusions or feeling the same way.