Top 40 Sadness Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Frank Ocean

2. “Tears are words the heart can’t express.”

— Gerard Way

3. “It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.”

— Terry Pratchett

4. “When you feel like you’ve had it up to here, and you’re mad enough to scream, but you’re sad enough to tear, that’s rock bottom.”

— Eminem

5. “Its good to leave each day behind, like flowing water, free of sadness. Yesterday is gone and its tale told. Today new seeds are growing.”

— Rumi

Also featured in: Quotes About Water

6. “The sadness will last forever.”

— Vincent van Gogh

7. “If you came to see the truth, the purity, it’s here inside a lonely heart.”

— Michael Jackson

Also featured in: Lonely Quotes

8. “I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”

— Charles Bukowski

9. “There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.”

— Virginia Woolf

10. “The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

11. “Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

12. “I wanna outrace the speed of pain.”

— Marilyn Manson

13. “Sky of blackness and sorrow, sky of love, sky of tears. Sky of glory and sadness, sky of mercy, sky of fear.”

— Bruce Springsteen

Also featured in: Sky Quotes

14. “Beware of sadness It can hit you It can hurt you Make you sore and what is more That is not what you are here for.”

— George Harrison

15. “Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative, you can get beyond your pain or negativity.”

— Yoko Ono

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes

16. “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”

— Léon Bloy

17. “I wear my crown of thorns on my liars chair, full of broken thoughts I cannot repair, beneath the stain of time the feelings disappears. What have I become, my sweetest of friends?”

— Johnny Cash

18. “In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.”

— William S. Burroughs

Also featured in: Complaining Quotes

19. “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

20. “A rose looks grey at midnight, but the flame is just asleep. And steel is strong because it knows the hammer and white heat.”

— Johnny Cash

Also featured in: Strong Quotes

21. “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

— Isaac Asimov

Also featured in: Science Quotes, Quotes About Thinking, Knowledge Quotes

22. “Don’t let the sadness from the past and fear of the future ruin the happiness of the present.”

— Kid Cudi

23. “There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of even one small candle.”

— Robert Alden

24. “Let there be sunshine, let there be rain, let the broken hearted love again.”

— Bruce Springsteen

Also featured in: Rain Quotes

25. “Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.”

— Eckhart Tolle

26. “Deep in the heart of the infinite darkness, a tiny blue marble is spinning through space. Born in the splendor of God’s holy vision, and sliding away like a tear down his face.”

— Johnny Cash

27. “There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.”

— David Foster Wallace

28. “Feel no sadness because of evil thoughts: it only strengthens them.”

— Nachman of Breslov

29. “Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Also featured in: Romance Quotes

30. “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

Also featured in: Humble Quotes

31. “What a sad business is being funny!”

— Charlie Chaplin

32. “Life is but a sleep disturbed by dreaming, prompted by the will; the saddened soul with sadness hides it’s secrets, and the gay, with thrill.”

— Khalil Gibran

33. “Often we see a couple who has separated or divorced and look with sadness at the ‘failure’ of their relationship. But if both people learned what they were meant to learn, then that relationship was a success.”

— Marianne Williamson

34. “In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Also featured in: Real Quotes

35. “For a human being, sadness is as powerful as terror. Sadness makes a warrior shed tears of blood.”

— Carlos Castaneda

36. “Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Also featured in: Quotes About Childhood

37. “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

Also featured in: Betrayal Quotes

38. “In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.”

— Susan Sontag

39. “To finish is a sadness to a writer – a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.”

— John Steinbeck

Also featured in: Quotes About Stories

40. “A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.”

— Joseph Conrad