60 sad quotes on life and love to help lift your spirits (2025)

Everyone has good days and bad.

When things are feeling especially hard, it's important to remember that you're not alone and everybody is going through something at one time or another.

As the famous NFL player, Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier, once sang in “Free to Be ... You and Me,” Marlo Thomas' iconic kids' album from the ‘70s, “It's alright to cry, crying gets the sad out of you.”

If you need to get the sad out, give this collection of sad quotes a read to be reminded that even when life gets hard, it's only a matter of time before things will look up.

In the list below, you'll find introspective quotes about life and love written or spoken by luminaries like William Shakespeare, John Lennon, Taylor Swift and Fred Rogers, among many others.

Whether you're hoping to express that you're in the midst of a mercury-in-retrograde moment or plan to send one of these reflective quotes to a friend who needs a bit of extra support, these somber-but-uplifting sentiments can be used for any occasion.

After all, sad isn't bad — it's just a temporary tough patch, with sunshine waiting on the other side.

However you choose to use these contemplative words and sad quotes, remember to keep on keeping on.

Sad quotes about life

• “March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life’s path.” — Kahlil Gibran
• “Life is just what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” — John Lennon
• “It’s all right to cry / Crying gets the sad out of you.” — Rosey Grier, “It's Alright to Cry”
• “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” — Jonathan Safran Foer
• “A moment it appears, At either end of years, At either end of days. But nothing golden stays.” — Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

• “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” — Kahlil Gibran
• “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
• “What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.” — John Irving, “The Cider House Rules”
• “Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.” — Rupi Kaur, “milk and honey”
• “Words are tears that have been written down.Tears are words that need to be shed.Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end.” — Paulo Coelho

• “There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have a feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well. So I take the memories as they come, accepting them all, letting them guide me whenever I can.” — Nicholas Sparks, “Dear John”
• “When you’re happy, you enjoy themusic, but when you’re sad, you understand the lyrics.” — Frank Ocean
• “For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’” — John Greenleaf Whittier
• “It’s sad, something coming to an end. It cracks you open, in a way — cracks you open to feeling. When you try to avoid the pain, it creates greater pain.” — Jennifer Aniston
• “Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.” — Christopher Morley

• “It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to. It takes strength to talk about our feelings and to reach out for help and comfort when we need it.” — Fred Rogers, “The World According to Mister Rogers”
• “A wound that goes unacknowledged and unwept is a wound that cannot heal.” — John Eldredge
• “Crying is cleansing. There’s a reason for tears, happiness or sadness.” — Dionne Warwick
• “Those who do not weep, do not see.” — Victor Hugo, “Les Miserables”
• “It’s so devastating to come to terms with speaking of someone in past tense when you used to see them as your present and your future.” — Taylor Swift

• “We all yearn for what we have lost. But sometimes, we forget what we have.” — Mitch Albom, “The Timekeeper”
• “I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colors and shades I knew existed.” — Katie McGarry, “Pushing the Limits”
• “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, “Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War”
• “Songs are as sad as the listener.” — Jonathan Safran Foer, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”

• “Sorrow looks back. Worry looks around. Faith looks up.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “There’s a sorrow and pain in everyone’s life, but every now and then there’s a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.” — Hubert Selby Jr., “Requiem for a Dream”
• “Chase away sorrow by living.” — Melissa Marr, “Darkest Mercy”
• “When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, “Eat, Pray, Love”

• “Oh, I am very weary, / Though tears no longer flow; / My eyes are tired of weeping, / My heart is sick of woe.” — Anne Brontë
• “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.” — Charles Dickens, “Great Expectations”
• “Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy.” — Marlene Dietrich
• “I can’t remember anything without a sadness so deep that it hardly becomes known to me, so deep that its tears leave me a spectator of my own stupidity.” — John Lennon
• “Sorrow makes us all children again — destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “When she is happy, she can’t stop talking, when she is sad, she doesn’t say a word.” — Ann Brashares, “Girl in Pants: The Third Summer of Sisterhood”

• “For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.” — Lauren Oliver
• “From sorrow to sorrow love crosses its islands and establishes roots that are watered by weeping.” — Pablo Neruda
• “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• “You get used to sadness, growing up in the mountains, I guess.” — Loretta Lynn
• “Not a day passes over the earth but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows. Of these obscure heroes, philosophers, and martyrs the greater part will never be known.” — Charles Reade

• “The lessons we learn in sadness and from loss are those that abide.” — Theodore T. Munger
• “This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind.” — Pema Chödrön
• “In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.” — Henry Ward Beecher
• “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” — Dale Carnegie
• “Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey toward it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us.” — Samuel Smiles

Sad quotes about love

• “When all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” — E.A. Bucchianeri, “Brushstrokes of a Gadfly”
• “And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.” — Lord Byron
• “Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable.” — L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”
• “My world is a million shattered pieces put together, glued by my tears, where each piece is nothing but a reflection of you.” — Sanhita Baruah
• “I suppose a fire that burns that bright is not meant to last.” — Veronica Roth, “Allegiant”

• “The course of true love never did run smooth.” — William Shakespeare
• “It’s the heart, afraid of breaking / That never learns to dance.” — Bette Midler, “The Rose”
• “Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.” — Alphonse de Lamartine
• “Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
• “Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.” — Joan Crawford
• “But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.” — Stephen King

• “The problem with heartbreak is that nobody can help you when you’re heartbroken. Nobody and nothing.” — Alexa Chung
• “When the sun has set, no candle can replace it.” — George R.R. Martin
• “There is an ocean of silence between us … and I am drowning in it.”―Ranata Suzuki
• “Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.”―Jonathan Harnisch,Freak
• “Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.” — José N. Harris, “MI VIDA”