Top 100 Sadness Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Tears are words that need to be written.”

— Paulo Coelho

Also featured in: Interesting Quotes, Quotes About Writing, Quotes About Feelings, Moving Quotes

2. “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

Also featured in: Happiness Quotes, Deep Quotes About Life, Quotes About Humanity, Sorrow Quotes, Depression Quotes

3. “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

— C.G. Jung

Also featured in: Happiness Quotes, Patience Quotes, Psychology Quotes, Deep Quotes

4. “Write hard and clear about what hurts. ”

— Ernest Hemingway

Also featured in: Emotional Quotes, Quotes About Writing, Struggle Quotes, Suffering Quotes

5. “Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”

— Maya Angelou

Also featured in: Music Quotes, Emotional Quotes, Emotion Quotes, Meaningful Quotes

6. “The mirror is my best friend because when I cry it never laughs.”

— Charlie Chaplin

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Lonely Quotes, Emo Quotes

7. “Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.”

— Rumi

Also featured in: Emotional Quotes, Poetry Quotes, Sad Quotes, Loss Quotes

8. “And when you’re feeling empty, keep me in your memory. Leave out all the rest, leave out all the rest.”

— Linkin Park

Also featured in: Music Quotes, Emotional Quotes, Depression Quotes, Quotes About Songs

9. “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”

— John Greenleaf Whittier

Also featured in: Emotional Quotes, Sorrow Quotes, Past Quotes, Regret Quotes

10. “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.”

— Anonymous

Also featured in: Relationship Quotes, Loss Quotes, Pain Quotes, Broken Heart Quotes

11. “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

— William Shakespeare

Also featured in: Fiction Quotes, Deep Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Life Is Short Quotes

12. “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

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

13. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”

— Henry David Thoreau

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

14. “Leave my loneliness unbroken.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

Also featured in: Emotion Quotes, Sorrow Quotes, Loneliness Quotes

15. “Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.”

— Khalil Gibran

Also featured in: Emotion Quotes, Sad Quotes, Quotes About Feelings, Sorrow Quotes

16. “I went inside my heart to see how it was. Something there makes me hear the whole world weeping.”

— Rumi

Also featured in: Emotion Quotes, Sufism Quotes, Compassion Quotes, Meaning of Life Quotes

17. “Smile, it’s easier than explaining why you’re sad.”

— Frank Ocean

18. “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Also featured in: Loss Quotes, Quotes About Feelings, Loneliness Quotes

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

Also featured in: Emotion Quotes, Sad Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Depression Quotes

20. “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Also featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Philosophical Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Existentialism Quotes, Sorrow Quotes

21. “What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.”

— Seneca the Younger

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

22. “I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.”

— Frida Kahlo

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life

23. “Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”

— Franz Kafka

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

24. “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

— Oscar Wilde

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life

25. “I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”

— Franz Kafka

Also featured in: Loss Quotes, Quotes About Feelings, Loneliness Quotes, Broken Heart Quotes

26. “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”

— William Shakespeare

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

27. “A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.”

— Taylor Swift

Also featured in: Music Quotes, Emotion Quotes, Quotes About Feelings, Broken Heart Quotes

28. “There are no happy endings.”

— George R.R. Martin

Also featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Sad Quotes

29. “All lives end. All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage.”

— Steven Moffat

Also featured in: Sad Quotes

30. “To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature.”

— Seneca

Also featured in: Struggle Quotes, Philosophy Quotes, Sorrow Quotes, Pain Quotes

31. “Even those who never frown eventually break down.”

— Linkin Park

Also featured in: Mental Health Quotes, Sad Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Depression Quotes

32. “There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”

— Neil Gaiman

Also featured in: Sad Quotes, Loss Quotes, Broken Heart Quotes, Hurt Quotes

33. “Your sadness is because of the thorn of desire in your heart. If you do not take notice of this, it will turn into cynicism, frustration and anger. You need to pull it out and throw it. Then you will feel uplifted and happy.”

— Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Also featured in: Desire Quotes, Healing Quotes

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

— J. R. R. Tolkien

Also featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Loss Quotes, Suffering Quotes

35. “The world has kissed my Soul with its pain, asking for its return in Songs.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

Also featured in: Poetry Quotes, Suffering Quotes

36. “Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”

— Mother Teresa

Also featured in: Care Quotes, Quotes About Humanity, Loneliness Quotes

37. “Why am I dying to live if I’m just living to die.”

— Tupac Shakur

Also featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life

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

— Victor Hugo

Also featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Suffering Quotes, Grief Quotes

39. “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, Sad Quotes About Life

40. “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

— Aeschylus

Also featured in: Moving Quotes, Sorrow Quotes, Adversity Quotes, Pain Quotes

41. “Solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, deathlike solitude.”

— Mary Shelley

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

42. “The heart will break, but broken live on.”

— Lord Byron

Also featured in: Poetry Quotes, Loss Quotes, Quotes About Heart, Broken Heart Quotes

43. “When you’re happy you enjoy the music, but when you’re sad you understand the lyrics.”

— Frank Ocean

44. “I can't set my hopes too high, because every hello ends with a goodbye.”

— Demi Lovato

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Loss Quotes, Heartbreak Quotes

45. “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”

— L.M. Montgomery

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Loss Quotes, Disappointment Quotes

46. “Let it die. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.”

— Charles Bukowski

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Demotivational Quotes

47. “In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

— Solomon

Also featured in: Scripture Quotes, Life is Hard Quotes, Depressing Quotes, Grief Quotes

48. “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: Sad Quotes About Life, Loss Quotes, Rain Quotes

49. “We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

— Franz Kafka

Also featured in: Depressing Quotes, Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Also featured in: Legacy Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Loss Quotes, Past Quotes