Top 100 Sad Quotes About Life

1. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

— Henry David Thoreau

Also featured in: Deep Quotes About Life, Sad Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes

2. “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Also featured in: Failure Quotes, Emotional Quotes, Acceptance Quotes, Meaningful Quotes

3. “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Pain Quotes, Sadness Quotes

4. “Human life must be some form of mistake.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Sad Quotes, Depression Quotes

5. “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”

— Albert Camus

Also featured in: Coffee Quotes

6. “Nothing is permanent in this wicked world, not even our troubles.”

— Charlie Chaplin

Also featured in: Change Quotes, Reflection Quotes, Bad Day Quotes

7. “It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Also featured in: Happiness Quotes, Life is Hard Quotes, Pain Quotes

8. “Is there no way out of the mind?”

— Sylvia Plath

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes

9. “There is no growth without change, no change without fear or loss and no loss without pain.”

— Rick Warren

Also featured in: Growth Quotes

10. “We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.”

— Charles Bukowski

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Depression Quotes

11. “I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

Also featured in: Self-Realization Quotes, Purpose Quotes, Creative Quotes

12. “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Sad Quotes, Suffering Quotes

13. “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

— Franz Kafka

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Demotivational Quotes

14. “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

— John Green

Also featured in: Sad Quotes

15. “Life should be lived to the point of tears.”

— Albert Camus

Also featured in: Short Quotes About Life, Emotion Quotes, Deep Quotes, Existentialism Quotes

16. “Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Also featured in: Life Is Short Quotes

17. “This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Fight Club Quotes

18. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”

— T. S. Eliot

Also featured in: Deep Quotes, Sad Quotes

19. “This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Life Is Short Quotes, Fight Club Quotes

20. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”

— Aldous Huxley

Also featured in: Different Quotes, Loneliness Quotes, Lonely Quotes

21. “And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

Also featured in: Emotion Quotes, Sad Quotes, Depression Quotes, Sadness Quotes

22. “Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.”

— John Lennon

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Lonely Quotes

23. “Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”

— J.K. Rowling

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Quotes About Feelings, Suffering Quotes

24. “Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Also featured in: Suffering Quotes

25. “Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Also featured in: Loss Quotes, Suffering Quotes, Sorrow Quotes

26. “That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.”

— William Wordsworth

Also featured in: Poetry Quotes, Loss Quotes, Healing Grief Quotes

27. “I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”

— Augusten Burroughs

Also featured in: August Quotes

28. “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”

— Mary Oliver

Also featured in: Sorrow Quotes, Healing Grief Quotes, Grief Quotes

29. “You want to live-but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying-and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?”

— Seneca the Younger

Also featured in: Meaning Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Existentialism Quotes

30. “I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.”

— Robert Browning

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Not Giving Up Quotes, Loneliness Quotes

31. “Nothing gold can stay.”

— Robert Frost

32. “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”

— Albert Camus

Also featured in: Existentialism Quotes

33. “I feel much better, now that I’ve given up hope.”

— Ashleigh Brilliant

Also featured in: Silly Quotes, Giving Up Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Demotivational Quotes

34. “I don’t know how to live well. I only know how to suffer.”

— Bob Marley

Also featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Suffering Quotes

35. “There is no joy for the one who does not bear sadness, there is no sweetness for the one who does not have patience, there is no delight for the one who does not suffer, and there is no relaxation for the one who does not endure fatigue.”

— Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya

Also featured in: Resilience Quotes, Suffering Quotes, Sadness Quotes, Hurt Quotes

36. “I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

Also featured in: Loss Quotes, Suffering Quotes, Sadness Quotes

37. “Fear is stronger than love, remember that. Fear is stronger than love, all that love I gave didn’t mean nothing when it came to fear.”

— Tupac Shakur

38. “Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host.”

— Maya Angelou

39. “One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.”

— James Earl Jones

Also featured in: Quotes About Heart, Quotes About Reality

40. “If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Also featured in: Empathy Quotes, Life is Hard Quotes, Suffering Quotes

41. “Those who do not weep, do not see.”

— Victor Hugo

Also featured in: Suffering Quotes, Sadness Quotes, Grief Quotes

42. “The saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.”

— Nicholas Sparks

Also featured in: Care Quotes, Sadness Quotes

43. “Life is a constant process of dying.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Also featured in: Suffering Quotes

44. “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

— Anatole France

45. “My life has been nothing but a failure.”

— Claude Monet

46. “When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.”

— Audrey Hepburn

Also featured in: Loneliness Quotes

47. “Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anybody.”

— Stephen Chbosky

Also featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Loss Quotes, Growing Up Quotes

48. “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Also featured in: Legacy Quotes, Loss Quotes, Past Quotes, Sadness Quotes

49. “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before – more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”

— Charles Dickens

Also featured in: Loss Quotes, Sadness Quotes, Rain Quotes

50. “But you people do not understand me, and I am afraid you never will.”

— Vincent van Gogh

Also featured in: Loneliness Quotes