168+ Profound & Powerful Quotes About Losing a Loved One

Experiencing loss is universal and a natural part of life. Everyone has had to, or will, navigate through an agonizing loss of a loved one. Coping with this situation may be one of the hardest challenges that many of us face. Meaningful quotes about losing a loved one can help you get through the painful experience and help to deal with your grief.

If you’re searching for quotes about sadness and significant liar quotes that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of inspiring cheating quotes, famous divorce quotes and popular grief quotes.

Sympathy Quotes About Losing a Loved One

What is lovely never dies, but passes into another loveliness, star-dust or sea-foam, flower or winged air. – Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The darker the night, the brighter the stars; the deeper the grief, the closer is God! – Fyodor Dostoevsky

All deaths are sudden, no matter how gradual the dying may be. – Michael McDowell

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to. – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler

Those we love never truly leave us, Harry. There are things that death cannot touch. – Jack Thorne

No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. – C.S Lewis

Love doesn’t die with death. Love is like liquid; when it pours out, it seeps into others’ lives. Love changes form and shape. Love gets into everything. Death doesn’t conquer all; love does. Love wins every single time. Love wins by lasting through death. Love wins by loving more, loving again, loving without fear. – Kate O’Neill

When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. – Kahlil Gibran

The death of a beloved is an amputation. – C. S. Lewis

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. – Anne Lamott

“If tears could build a stairway,and memories a lane, I’d walk right up to Heaven and bring you home again.

Although it’s difficult today to see beyond the sorrow, May looking back in memory help comfort you tomorrow.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose; all that we deeply love becomes a part of us. – Helen Keller

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part. – Gail Caldwell

Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream. – Euripides

If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. – James O’Barr

You cannot stop loving your friend because he’s dead, especially if he was better than anyone alive, you know? – Jerome Salinger

When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him. – Madeline Miller

We are always gonna grieve someone so loved by us. It saddens me greatly for one as young as you to lose your beloved. I will leave you with knowing their is way forward, upward and out of your sorrow. Time does not heal the hurt but you talking with someone about your loss in time will.

Having something and losing it, it’s so much crueler than never having had it. – Victoria Schwab

quotes on losing a loved one too soon

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; love leaves a memory no one can steal. From an Irish headstone. – Richard Puz

The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love. – Kristina McMorris

Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face – I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself. – Nicholas Sparks

You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair. – Eva Ibbotson

quotes about the loss of a loved one

For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms. – Lurlene McDaniel

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. – A.A. Milne

I love you every day. And now I will miss you every day. – Mitch Albom

quotes when losing a loved one

Those we love and lose are always connected by heartstrings into infinity. – Terri Guillemets

Sometimes, when one person is absent, the whole world seems depopulated. – Alphonse de Lamartine

For some moments in life there are no words. – David Seltzer

Because death is the only thing that could have ever kept him from you. – Ally Carter

It takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, and a day to love them, but it takes an entire lifetime to forget them.

quotes for remembering a loved one

If you ever lose someone dear to you, never say the words they’re gone. They’ll come back. – Prince

Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there. I did not die.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome. – Isaac Asimov

The song is ended but the melody lingers on… – Irving Berlin

quotes for losing a loved one

We never truly get over a loss, but we can move forward and evolve from it. – Elizabeth Berrien

Remember that people are only guests in your story – the same way you are only a guest in theirs – so make the chapters worth reading. – Lauren Klarfeld

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened. – Dr. Seuss

All things grow with time, except grief. – Jewish proverb

If tears could build a stairway, and memories a lane, I’d walk right up to Heaven, and bring you home again.

Heart-Wrenching Quotes For Losing a Loved One

Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here’s what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it’s still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it’s been too long since you missed them last. – Kristin O’Donnell Tubb

People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So, in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it. – Fredrik Backman

While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil. – John Taylor

I am always saddened by the death of a good person. It is from this sadness that a feeling of gratitude emerges. I feel honored to have known them and blessed that their passing serves as a reminder to me that my time on this beautiful earth is limited and that I should seize the opportunity I have to forgive, share, explore, and love. I can think of no greater way to honor the deceased than to live this way. – Steve Maraboli

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world. – Henry David Thoreau

If you’re going through hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill

You don’t know who is important to you until you actually lose them. – Mahatma Gandhi

Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure. – Sue Grafton

Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained. – Jonathan Harnisch

It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her at all the places where she was alive. – John Scalzi

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. Death cannot kill what never dies. – William Penn

But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going into every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone. – Mitch Albom

Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean. – David Searls

Closed eyes, heart not beating, but a living love. – Avis Corea

Losing people you love affects you. It is buried inside of you and becomes this big, deep hole of ache. It doesn’t magically go away, even when you stop officially mourning. – Carrie Jones

The only way to get over a death is by seeing it as a life completed, instead of a life interrupted.

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. – Rumi

To live in hearts, we leave behind is not to die. – Thomas Campbell

When we lose someone we love we must learn not to live without them, but to live with the love they left behind.

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you’re faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking. – James Patterson

We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world – the company of those who have known suffering. – Helen Keller

Loss Of A Loved One Quotes

The dead never truly die. They simply change form. – Suzy Kassem

Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place. – Sarah Dessen

Death is tough for the people left behind on earth. – Prateeksha Malik

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people you left behind want to stop living. – Fredrik Backman

When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail’s response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, my bursting heart must find vent at my pen. – David McCullough

It is the capacity to feel consuming grief and pain and despair that also allows me to embrace love and joy and beauty with my whole heart. I must let it all in. – Anna White

Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality. – Emily Dickinson

Tears are God’s gift to us. Our holy water. They heal us as they flow. – Rita Schiano

Love is stronger than death even though it can’t stop death from happening, but no matter how hard death tries it can’t separate people from love. It can’t take away our memories either. In the end, life is stronger than death.

The few certainties in our existences are pain, death and bereavement. – Jane Wilson-Howarth

We shall find peace. We shall hear angels; we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds. – Anton Chekhov

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. – Richard Bach

I still loved Granny. It flowed out of my chest. With Granny gone, where would my love go? – Jessica Maria Tuccelli

Those we love don’t go away; they walk beside us every day. Unseen, unheard, but always near; still loved, still missed and very dear.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved. – Iris Murdoch

Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean. Some boats eventually floated ashore. And some boats, like me, seemed to float farther and farther from land – Ruta Sepetys

Deep down inside we always seek for our departed loved ones – Munia Khan

Death wasn’t a movie where the pretty star faded away with a touch of pale makeup and every hair in place. – Soheir Khashoggi

Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains. – Kahlil Gibran

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 messengers of overwhelming grief…and unspeakable love. – Washington Irving

Grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels…. – Rosamund Lupton

We understand death only after it has placed its hands on someone we love. – Anne L. de Stael

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery. – Dante

Death – the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening. – Walter Scott

For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. – William Penn

I wonder if my first breath was as soul-stirring to my mother as her last breath was to me. – Lisa Goich

Your end, which is endless, is as a snowflake dissolving in the pure air. – Zen Teaching

In the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life, there is a deafening alleluia rising from the souls of those who weep, and of those who weep with those who weep. If you watch, you will see the hand of God putting the stars back in their skies one by one. – Ann Weems

Death Of A Loved One Quotes About Grief, Coping and Life After Loss

Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me at all. – Laura Ingles Wilder

Death ends a life, not a relationship. – Mitch Albom

As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss. – Cassandra Clare

He died when he was only nineteen years old. I was still a baby at the time, so I didn’t remember him. Growing up, I’d always told myself that was lucky. Because you can’t miss someone you don’t remember. But the truth was, I did miss him. – Ernest Cline

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives. – Norman Cousins

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. – Kahlil Gibran

Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. – Steve Jobs

God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. – Revelation 21: 4

Though we are terrorized by death, it’s not different from birth, it just happens – Bangambiki Habyarimana

All of us have parents. Generations pass. We are not unique. Now it is our family’s turn. – Ralph Webster

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived. – George S. Patton Jr.

How do you go on knowing that you will never again – not ever, ever – see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together? – Howard Jacobson

No matter how prepared you think you are for the death of a loved one, it still comes as a shock, and it still hurts very deeply. – Billy Graham

Say not ‘Good-night’ but in some brighter clime, bid me ‘Good-morning.’ –Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Life is not profound without its own tragedy. It humbles us. Sets the bar for our introspection. Keeps us from believing we are gods. Puts our egos in check. – Crystal Evans

Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something. – Jackson Brown Jr.

We’re built to move on. Someone dies, no matter how close you are to them, you move on. That helps in a lot of ways. – Jimmy Iovine

Perhaps they are not the stars, but rather openings in Heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.

May you find the strength and resolve today, to allow a deeper sense of healing to begin. – Eleesha

And yet I want to be human; I want to be thinking of him because then I feel he is alive somewhere, if only in my head. – Sally Green

I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me, but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss. – Rita Mae Brown

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life. – Anne Roiphe

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief. – Aeschylus

After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. – Albus Dumbledore

I wanted to kill someone, and I wanted to die, and I wanted to run as far and as fast as I could because she was never coming back. She had fallen off the face of the earth and she was never coming back. – Melissa Kantor

The sun can break through the darkest cloud; love can brighten the gloomiest day. – William Arthur Ward

The very worst part of grief is that you can’t control it. The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it when it comes. And let it go when we can. – Grey’s Anatomy

Everyone for whom I would have cried has already died. – Kathryn Orzech

The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives. – Rob Liano

Inspirational Losing Someone Quotes

The bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. – Anne Lamott

Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms. – Paulo Coelho

In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods of tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life. – Nicholas Sparks

There are some who bring a light so great to the world that even after they have gone the light remains.

Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow. – Robert Louis Stevenson

Perhaps they are not stars in the sky but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy.

Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. – Jandy Nelson

In life, we loved you dearly, in death we love you still. In our hearts you hold a place, no one else will ever fill.

End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The gray rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it. – J.R.R. Tolkien

Our joys will be greater, our love will be deeper, our life will be fuller because we shared your moment.

Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. – Alfred Lord Tennyson

Those we love never truly leave us. There are things that death cannot touch. – Jack Thorne

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it. – Helen Keller

I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains. – Anne Frank

He spoke well who said that graves are the footprints of angels. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again. – Maya Angelou

The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment. – Dr. Colin Murray Parkes

When you lose someone you love, you gain an angel you know.

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal. – C.S. Lewis

Everyone copes differently, some cry for the loss of a loved one others smile because they know they’ll see them again.

There is no death. Only a change of worlds. – Chief Seattle

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass; it’s about learning to dance in the rain. – Vivian Greene

Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart. – José N. Harris

It is not length of life, but depth of life. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today. – Richard Adams

Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us. – Meister Eckhart

To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. – J.K. Rowling

Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but in thankfulness that he was. – Hebrew Proverb

Darkness may hide the trees and the flowers from the eyes but it cannot hide love from the soul. – Rumi

Only a moment you stayed, but what an imprint your footprints have left on our hearts. – Dorothy Ferguson

There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart. – Mahatma Gandhi

Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island. – Neil Gaiman

Do not cry because they are past! Smile, because they once were! – Ludwig Jacobowski

If it were possible to heal sorrow by weeping and to raise the dead with tears, gold were less prized than grief. – Sophocles

He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend. – Sir Henry Taylor

It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. – John Steinbeck

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals. – Leo Tolstoy

As long as we live, they too will live, for they are now a part of us, as We remember them. – Proverb

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break. – William Shakespeare

Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. – Dylan Thomas

All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. – C.S. Lewis

I should know enough about the loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone – you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence. – Alyson Noel

They say that a part of you dies when a special loved one passes away… I disagree… I say a part of you lives with your loved one on the other side. – Daniel Yanez

It is the will of God and Nature that these mortal bodies be laid aside, when the soul is to enter into real life; ’tis rather an embryo state, a preparation for living; a man is not completely born until he be dead: Why then should we grieve that a new child is born among the immortals? – Benjamin Franklin

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. – Thornton Wilder

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. – Psalms 34:18

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. – Matthew 5:4

About the Author

Deniz Yalım is the founder and visionary behind BayArt, a platform renowned for its deeply resonant and inspirational content focusing on love, relationship, happiness, success and motivation. With a background rich in literature, psychology, and communication, Deniz has dedicated their career to the art of using words to inspire and empower. Passionate about the transformative power of language, Deniz has skillfully curated BayArt to be a platform for those seeking wisdom and guidance in the realms of love and life. Their writings not only reflect a deep understanding of human emotions and relationships but also aim to ignite change and encourage positive thinking. Through BayArt, Deniz Yalım continues to touch lives, offering solace, motivation, and a sense of connectedness to a global community.