Sadness isn't easy to embrace. While instinct may prompt us to "fix" the situation, it's often best to lean into things—even if you don't have the right words to do so. Below, we've collected over 100 sad quotes to help you articulate your feelings on life, love, and loneliness. By the time you get through the list, you'll have some new insights to share with those struggling with the same.
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Sad Quotes To Help You Cry Things Out
Whether you're comforting a loved one, grieving the loss of another, or recovering from a heartbreak all of your own, these quotes are sure to help you through it.
Sad Quotes About Love and Heartache
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- “Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” – Kahlil Gibran
- “Some people are going to leave, but that’s not the end of your story. That’s the end of their part in your story.” ― Faraaz Kazi
- “Don’t let the scars on your heart define the way you love.” ― Laura Chouette
- “When you think you’re first falling in love, just then you realize you’re falling out of love.” ― David Grayson
- “Falling in love is like holding a candle. Initially, it lightens up the world around you. Then it starts melting and hurts you. Finally, it goes off and everything is darker than ever and all you are left with is the… BURN!” ― Syed Arshad
- “It’s amazing how someone can break your heart and you can still love them with all the little pieces.” – Ella Harper
- “You make me feel like a firefly. Trapped in a bell jar; starved for love.” ― Ayushee Ghoshal
- “There is love, of course. And then there’s life, its enemy.” — Jean Anouilh
- “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” — Washington Irving
- “Nothing is worse than when someone who’s supposed to love you just leaves.” — Ava Dellaira
- “I’ve tried to reclaim a lost love and didn’t know how to do it.” — Sam Worthington
- “I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away: there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life.” – Plato
- “There is one pain, I often feel, which you will never know. It’s caused by the absence of you.” – Ashleigh Brilliant
- “Relationships are like glass. Sometimes it’s better to leave them broken than try to hurt yourself putting it back together.” – Unknown
- “Love lies in those unsent drafts in your mailbox. Sometimes you wonder whether things would have been different if you’d clicked ‘Send.'” – Faraaz Kazi
- “How could an Angel break my heart? Why didn’t he catch my falling star? I wish I didn’t wish so hard. Maybe I wished our love apart.” ― Toni Braxton
- “It’s sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.” – Henry Rollins
- “If we must part forever, give me but one kind word to think upon, And please myself with, while my heart’s breaking.” – Thomas Otway
Sad Quotes About Family
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- “Family is supposed to be our safe haven. Very often, it’s the place where we find the deepest heartache.” ― Iyanla Vanzant
- “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ― Leo Tolstoy
- “Parents kill more dreams than anybody.” ― Spike Lee
- “One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.” ― Margaret Mead
- “I loved him, but I didn’t know how to fix all of the things that were broken in our family.” ― Brodi Ashton
- “Broken relationships are a source of heavy heartbreak that seem to affect every family.” ― Jerry B. Jenkins
- “Family tragedies had a way of smashing everything apart and then gluing it all back together. The problem was no one ever knew how long the glue would hold.” ― Sarah Ockler
- “It hurts to leave a light on for nobody.” ― Graham Foust
- “Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.” – George Eliot
- “Sometimes it makes me sad that I didn’t get to have one family for my entire life.” – Isabel Gillies
- “When you inherit a broken family, you can’t throw it away and get a new one. What you can do is find people and situations that provide for you what your family cannot.” – Iyanla Vanzant
Sad Quotes About Life
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- “The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” – Carl Jung
- “The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.” — Alain de Botton
- “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not, and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.” — John Steinbeck
- “It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen.”— Brigitte Bardot
- “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.” — Sylvia Plath
- “Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anybody.” – Stephen Chbosky
- “The more you love, the more you cry.” – Priyanshu Singh
- “Those who do not weep, do not see.” – Victor Hugo
- “There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.” — Dante Alighieri
- “Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.” — Henry David Thoreau
- “Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.” — Ernest Renan
- “The fundamental delusion—there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.” — Naval Ravikant
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Sad Quotes About Loneliness
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- “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” — Mother Teresa
- “Yes, there is joy, fulfillment, and companionship, but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.” — Sylvia Plath
- “For fear you will be alone, you do so many things that aren’t you at all.” — Richard Brautigan
- “There is something immaculate about loneliness which only lonely people can understand.”– Munia Khan
- “All great and precious things are lonely.” — John Steinbeck
- “Sometimes you have to stand alone just to make sure you still can.” — Anonymous
- “There's a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night's.”– Ed Gorman
- “Loneliness is a tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.” — Alain de Botton
- “Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.” ― Douglas Coupland
- “The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.” — Mark Twain
- “Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.” – Martha Beck
- “Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.”– Poppy Z. Brite
Sad Quotes About Death
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- “Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.” – Margaret Mitchell
- “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.” – Harriet Beecher Stowe
- “So it's true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” – E.A. Bucchianeri
- “When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”― Madeline Miller
- “You cannot stop loving your friend because he's dead, especially if he was better than anyone alive, you know?” — J.D. Salinger
- “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.” – George Eliot
- “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” – Isaac Asimov
- “Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.” – Emily Dickinson
- “We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” – Kenji Miyazawa
- “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”– A. A. Milne
- “We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.” – Paolo Coelho
Sad Movie Quotes
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- “They judge me before they even know me. That’s why I’m better off alone.” — Shrek
- “You can leave. I’ll remember you. I remember everyone that leaves.” — Lilo and Stitch
- “Some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. But still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend.”
- “What a beautiful place... to be with friends.” — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
- “I never had friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12.” — Stand By Me
- “You care for me, but love another.” — La Belle Personne
- “Rhett, Rhett… Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?” — Gone With The Wind
- “You said you’d always be there for me, but you’re not.” — The Lion King
- “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.” — The Princess Bride
- “I guess when you’re young, you just believe there’ll be many people … you’ll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.” — Before Sunset
- “People change. Feelings change. It doesn't mean that the love once shared wasn't true or real. It simply means that sometimes when people grow, they grow apart.” — 500 Days of Summer
- “I love you but you're not mine.” — The Corpse Bride
— The Shawshank Redemption
Sad Quotes That Inspire
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- “The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.” – Jim Rohn
- “There is a time for departure, even when there’s no certain place to go.” – Tennessee Williams
- “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’” – John Greenleaf Whittier
- “Sadness flies away on the wings of time.” – Jean de La Fontaine
- “We must understand that sadness is an ocean, and sometimes we drown, while other days we are forced to swim.” – R.M. Drake
- “Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.” – Kahlil Gibran
- "There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have the feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well.” – Nicholas Sparks
- “In deep sadness, there is no place for sentimentality.” – Hunter S. Thompson
- “Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.” – Christopher Morley
- “Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.” – Leonardo da Vinci
- “Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.” – C.S. Lewis
- “Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.” – Clive Barker
- “I always like walking in the rain, so no one can see me crying.” – Charlie Chaplin
Sad Quotes About Saying Goodbye
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- “I guess that’s what saying goodbye is always like; like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you’re in the air, there’s nothing you can do but let go.” ― Lauren Oliver
- “There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart.” — Mahatma Gandhi
- “If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.” – Paulo Coelho
- “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” – Dr. Seuss
- “Goodbye always makes my throat hurt.” – Charles M. Schultz
- “Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.” – Rumi
- “You know it’s love when you have been saying goodbye for how many times but still you’re not ready to leave.” – Unknown
- “Man’s feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell.” — Jean Paul Richter
- “The pain of a hard goodbye is the heart’s tribute to the privilege to love.” – Beth Moore
- “The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected.” – Nicholas Sparks
- “It’s time to say goodbye, but I think goodbyes are sad and I’d much rather say hello. Hello to a new adventure.” – Ernie Harwell
