137 Quotes About the Loss of a Loved One to Comfort Your Heart

Losing a loved one leaves an indelible mark on our lives, reshaping our existence in ways we never imagined. In moments of such profound grief, words often become the solace that offers some semblance of understanding and comfort.

Explore these poignant quotes about the loss of a loved one that illuminate the complex emotions of loss and the enduring spirit that keeps memories alive.

Discover quotes that cherish memories and evoke the enduring presence of those who have departed, illuminating the beauty of their lasting legacy.

1. “Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.” — The Wonder Years

2. “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.” — C.S. Lewis

3. “He spoke well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

4. “In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams … that is where you and I shall meet.” — Lewis Carroll

5. “Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in a time of sorrow.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

6. “When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure.” 

7. “You gave me a forever within the numbered days…” — John Green

8. “There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart.” — Mahatma Gandhi

9. “What is lovely never dies, but passes into another loveliness, Star-dust or sea-foam, Flower or winged air.” — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

10. “If you’re searching for a quote that puts your feelings into words – you won’t find it. You can learn every language and read every word ever written – but you’ll never find what’s in your heart. How can you? He has it.” — Ranata Suzuki

11. “We’ve shared our lives these many years. You’ve held my hand; you’ve held my heart. So many blessings, so few tears – yet for a moment, we must part.”

12. “If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk in my garden forever.” — Alfred Lord Tennyson

13. “When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the 5 stages of grief….
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance ….. What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day.” — Ranata Suzuki

14. “I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand.
And when the light has long since gone …. I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.” — Ranata Suzuki

15. “When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time – the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes – when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever – there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.” — John Irving

16. “There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.” — Dante Alighieri

17. “When I am lonely, I think of you and all that you brought to my life. Your memory rests gently on my soul.” — Cindy Adkins

18. “People touch our lives if only for a moment, And yet we’re not the same from that moment on, The time is not important, The moment is forever.” — Fern Bork

19. “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

20. “Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds its way back to you.” — Ranata Suzuki

21. “The melody that the loved one played upon the piano of your life will never be played quite that way again, but we must not close the keyboard and allow the instrument to gather dust. We must seek out other artists of the spirit, new friends who gradually will help us to find the road to life again, who will walk the road with us.” — Joshua Loth Liebman

22. “Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That’s the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what’s left, that’s the part you have to make up as you go.” — Katharine Weber

23. “Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.” — Haruki Murakami

Journey through the depths of sorrow and sadness and the path to healing with these quotes, each a beacon of understanding in the profound sadness of loss.

24. “Grief is itself a medicine.” — William Cowper

25. “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.” — C.S Lewis

26. “Grief does not change you, it reveals you.” — John Green

27. “Grief is not a disorder, a disease, or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical, and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure to grief is to grieve.“ — Earl Grollman

28. “There are three needs of the griever: To find the words for the loss, to say the words aloud and to know that the words have been heard.”
Victoria Alexander

29. “Why does it take a minute to say hello and forever to say goodbye?”

30. “There are three needs of the griever: To find the words for the loss, to say the words aloud and to know that the words have been heard.” — Victoria Alexander

31. “But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.” — Viktor E. Frankl

32. “It takes strength to make your way through grief, to grab hold of life and let it pull you forward.” — Patti Davis

33. “We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.” — Confucius

34. “Don’t run away from grief, o’ soul. Look for the remedy inside the pain because the rose came from the thorn and the ruby came from a stone.” — Rumi

35. “Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

36. “They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.” — Cassandra Clare

37. “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

38. “Grieving doesn’t make you imperfect. It makes you human.” — Sarah Dessen

39. “Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.“ — Euripides

40. “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” — Marcel Proust

41. “Make the most of your regrets; Never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it ’til it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.” — Henry David Thoreau

42. “Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.” — Terry Pratchett

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

44. “Grief can destroy you — or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it.” — Dean Koontz

45. “Tears are the silent language of grief.” — Voltaire

46. “Grief is like the ocean. It comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” — Vicki Harrison

47. “Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.” — Alphonse de Lamartine

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

49. “Grief is what I feel when someone passes away, Grief is what I feel when I am concerned, Grief is what I feel when I have done wrong, Grief is what I feel when some accident happens, Grief is something that all people have gone through.” — Brandi Reissig

50. “The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.” — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

51. “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” — Edna St. Vincent Millay

52. “Grief changes shape, but it never ends.” — Keanu Reeves

53. “Tears have a wisdom all their own. They come when a person has relaxed enough to let go and to work through his sorrow. They are the natural bleeding of an emotional wound, carrying the poison out of the system. Here lies the road to recovery.” — F. Alexander Magoun

54. “You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really feel the loss.” — Mandy Hale

55. “There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

56. “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

57. “Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.” — Buddhist Saying

58. “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.” — Elizabeth Kübler-Ross

59. “Our grief is as individual as our lives.” — Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

60. “Look closely and you will see almost everyone carrying bags of cement on their shoulders. That’s why it takes courage to get out of bed in the morning and climb into the day.” — Edward Hirsch

61. “The only cure for grief is action.” — George Henry Lewes

62. “Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.” — Earl Grollman

63. “Nothing that grieves us can be called little; by the external laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.” — Mark Twain

64. “The holiest of holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart: The secret anniversaries of the heart.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

65. “Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.” — José N. Harris

66. “And once the storm is over you won’t remember you how made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm’s all about.” — Haruki Murakami

67. “Grief can’t be shared. Everyone carries it alone; his own burden in his own way.” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

68. “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.” — Helen Keller

69. “When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.” — Sufi

70. “It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses.” — Colette

71. “It is worth remembering that the time of greatest gain in terms of wisdom and inner strength is often that of greatest difficulty.” — Dalai Lama

72. “The fact that something has happened to a million other people diminishes neither grief nor joy.”

73. “We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.” — Dean Koontz

Experience quotes that celebrate the enduring impact of love, transcending loss, and honoring the eternal legacies left behind.

74. “Love is really the only thing we can possess, keep with us, and take with us.” — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

75. “Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.” — Emily Dickinson

76. “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest.” — Jamie Anderson

77. “We get no choice. If we love, we grieve.” — Thomas Lynch

78. “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” — Helen Keller

79. “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” — Thomas Campbell

80. “Grief is just love with no place to go.” — Jamie Anderson

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

82. “There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, so just give me a happy middle and a very happy start.” — Shel Silverstein

83. “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” — A.A. Milne

84. “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 

85. “Grief is the price we pay for love.” — Queen Elizabeth II

86. “Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.” — Orson Scott Card

87. “No farewell words were spoken, no time to say goodbye, you were gone before we knew it, and only God knows why.”

88. “I wish I had done everything on earth with you.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

89. “The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief – But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.” — Hillary Stanton Zunin

90. “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

91. “Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.” — Alphonse de Lamartine

92. “There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.” — Aeschylus

93. “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.” — From a headstone in Ireland

94. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” — Helen Keller

95. “Grief and love are conjoined — you don’t get one without the other.” — Jandy Nelson

96. “We get no choice. If we love, we grieve.” — Thomas Lynch

97. “I’m gone now, but I’m still very near, death can never separate us. Each time you feel a gentle breeze, it’s my hand caressing your face. Each time the wind blows, it carries my voice whispering your name. When the wind blows your hair ever so slightly, think of it as me pushing a few stray hairs back in place. When you feel a few raindrops fall on your face, it’s me placing soft kisses. At night look up in the sky and see the stars shining so brightly. I’m one of those stars and I’m winking at you and smiling with delight. For never forget, you’re the apple of my eye.” — Mary M Green

Seek solace in quotes that offer wisdom and solace from spiritual and philosophical perspectives, guiding through moments of loss with profound insight.

98. “You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” —  Chinese Proverb

99. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” — Psalm 46:1

100. “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” — Hebrews 13:5

101. “All things grow with time, except grief.” — Jewish Proverb

102. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

103. “For it is you who light my lamp; the Lord my God lightens my darkness.” — Psalms 18:28

104. “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28

105. “To Him we belong and to Him we return.” — Quran 2:156

106. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” — Philemon 4:7

107. “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” — Isaiah 41:10

108. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” — Isaiah 43:2

Reflect upon quotes that pay tribute to the significance of life’s journey and honor the profound impact of those who have completed their earthly sojourn.

109. “A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.” — Paul Valery

110. “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

111. “Death ends a life, not a relationship.” — Mitch Albom

112. “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

113. “A great soul serves everyone all the time A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.” — Maya Angelou

114. “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” — Dr. Seuss

115. “Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.” — Quintus Ennius

116. “Life is not the way it is supposed to be. It is the way it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.” — Virginia Satir

117. “Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.” — J. K. Rowling

118. “It is not length of life, but depth of life.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

119. “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” — Havelock Ellis

120. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built of a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touches some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.” — Ray Bradbury

121. “Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but live in thankfulness that he was.” — Hebrew Proverb

122. “Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.” — Rossiter Worthington Raymond

123. “Anything you lose comes round in another form.” — Rumi

124. “And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.” — Maya Angelou

125. “Some people come in your life as blessings. Some come in your life as lessons.” — Mother Teresa

126. “Perhaps they are not 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.” — Eskimo Proverb

127. “The song is ended but the melody lingers on.” — Irving Berlin

128. “We do not have to rely on memories to recapture the spirit of those we have loved and lost – they live within our souls in some perfect sanctuary which even death cannot destroy.” — Nan Witcomb

129. “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

130. “I’ll be seeing you, In all the old familiar places, That this heart of mine embraces, All day through.” — Billie Holiday

131. “I will welcome happiness for it enlarges my heart; Yet I will endure sadness for it opens my soul. I will acknowledge rewards for they are my due; Yet I will welcome obstacles for they are my challenge.” — Og Mandino

132. “As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.” — Leonardo da Vinci

133. “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” — J.K. Rowling

134. “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

135. “I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.” — Anne Frank

136. “Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” — George Eliot

137. “As long as I can I will look at this world for both of us. As long as I can I will laugh with the birds, I will sing with the flowers, I will pray to the stars, for both of us.” — Sascha

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