Last Updated: October 23, 2022 by Quote.cc Team
Grief is the response to lose, particularly the loss of someone or something that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. But grief is our response to the impact of a loss in our life. The loss of someone we love can be an excruciating experience. The death of a loved one and the grief that follows are among the most challenging experiences we as human beings can go through. Grief allows us to accept the loss of someone gradually.
Maybe someone you love has just gotten a challenging diagnosis, and you’re wondering what the future looks like. Or you’ve lost someone close to you, whether by death, divorce, or a painful disagreement, and you’re wondering how to move on. Some people believe that time will heal. In truth, it’s not that simple. Time doesn’t have magical healing properties, but it allows us to get used to what has happened, allowing reality to sink in slowly. As time goes by, the rawness of the pain usually eases.
Grief affects our feelings and how we think and behave and can adversely affect our health and wellness. It’s normal, natural, and necessary for us to grieve. So cry if you must, but learn to carry on by remembering them with a smile on your face.
I hope that you’ll find solace and some form of peace through these uplifting quotes about grief, the healing process, and the reality that this pain also means that you were lucky enough to have love in your life. Below, we’ve put together a collection of thoughtful quotes about grief from those who are perhaps more eloquent than we are to help. These 150 grief quotes will allow you a space to feel solidarity with those who have grieved before you.
150 Grief Quotes
Top 10 Grief Quotes
“Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.” – Patti Smith
“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” – Pierre Auguste Renoir
“Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
“It takes strength to make your way through grief, to grab hold of life and let it pull you forward.” – Patti Davis
“Joy comes, grief goes, we not know how.” – James Russell Lowell
“Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope” – Elizabeth Gilbert
“I work grief and sadness out of my body when I dance, and I bring in joy and rhythm.” – Inga Muscio
“Grief, no matter where it comes from, can only be resolved by connecting to other people.” – Thomas Horn
“Something terrible can happen to you, and yet, the day after this something terrible, the sun still rises, and life goes on. And therefore, so must you.” – Martin Short
“This should be the motto for every follower of Jesus Christ: Never stop praying, no matter how dark and hopeless it may seem.” – Billy Graham
What is Grief?
“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
“Grief is the price we pay for love.” – Queen Elizabeth II
“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
“Grief is like a moving river, it’s always changing. I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It’s just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone.” – Michelle Williams
“Grief is itself a medicine.” – William Cowper
“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.” – Arthur Golden
“Our grief is as individual as our lives.” – Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“Real grief is not healed by time…If time does anything, it deepens our grief. The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she was for us, and the more intimately we experience what her love meant for us. Real, deep love is, as you know, very unobtrusive, seemingly easy and obvious, and so obvious that we take it for granted. Therefore, it is often only in retrospect – or better, in memory, that we fully realize its power and depth. Yes, indeed, love often makes itself visible in pain.” – Henri Nouwen
“Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.” – V.C. Andrews
“Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.” – Alphonse de Lamartine
“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” – John Green
“Grief changes shape, but it never ends.” – Keanu Reeves
“Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.” – Anne Roiphe
“Grief can’t be shared. Everyone carries it alone; his own burden in his own way.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“Grieving is a necessary passage and a difficult transition to finally letting go of sorrow – it is not a permanent rest stop.” – Dodinsky
“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. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see that it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.” – Dean Koontz
“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
Famous Grief Quotes
“A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.” – Maya Angelou
“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
“Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you’ve lived.” – Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“Every heart has its secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“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
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” – William Shakespeare
“Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.” – William Faulkner
“Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but live in thankfulness that he was.” – Hebrew proverb
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller
“There are no happy endings, endings are the saddest part. So just give me a happy middle and a very happy start.” – Shel Silverstein
“There are some who bring a light so great to the world that even after they have gone the light remains.”
“There is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.” – Alice Walker
“To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.” – Erich Fromm
“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
“While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.” – Samuel Johnson
“You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” – Old Chinese proverb
“You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.” – J.K. Rowling
Short Grief Quotes
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” – Dr. Seuss
“I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.” – Anne Frank
“I will not say: Do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
“No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn’t stop for your grief.” – Faraaz Kazi
“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.” – C.S Lewis
“Tears are the silent language of grief.” – Voltaire
“Tears water our growth.” – William Shakespeare
“There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.” – Aeschylus
“Time heals old pain, while it creates new ones.” – Proverb
“To weep is to make less the depth of grief.” – William Shakespeare
“We need never be afraid of our tears.” – Charles Dickens
“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” – Kenji Miyazawa
“What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.” – Jewish proverb
“When it is darkest, we can see the stars.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Why does it take a minute to say hello and forever to say goodbye?”
Dog Grief Quotes
“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. ” – Mark Twain
“The misery of keeping a dog is his dying so soon. But, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?” – Sir Walter Scott
“If there is a heaven, it’s certain our animals are to be there. Their lives become so interwoven with our own, it would take more than an archangel to detangle them.” – Pam Brown
“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” – Will Rogers
“I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race; for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if they were to live double that time?” – Sir Walter Scott
“Sometimes losing a pet is more painful than losing a human because in the case of the pet, you were not pretending to love it.” – Amy Sedaris
“Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love, they depart to teach us about loss. A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs your heart is very big.” – Erica Jong
Grief Quotes Bible
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“No farewell words were spoken, no time to say goodbye, you were gone before we knew it, and only God knows why.”
“Keep your head up. God gives his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers…”
“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.”
“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” – J.M. Barrie
“Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.” – Matthew 5:4
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” – Buddhist
“If tears could build a stairway,and memories a lane, I’d walk right up to Heaven and bring you home again.”
Grief Quotes For Dad/Mom
“To her, the name of father was another name for love.” – Fanny Fern
“When my father didn’t have my hand, he had my back.” – Linda Poindexter
“Dads are most ordinary men turned by love into heroes, adventurers, storytellers, and singers of song.” – Pam Brown
“My father gave me my dreams. Thanks to him, I could see a future.” – Liza Minnelli
“If there is any immortality to be had among us human beings, it is certainly only in the love that we leave behind. Fathers like mine don’t ever die.” – Leo Buscaglia
“It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.” – Anne Sexton
“There is no expiration date on the love between a father and his child.” – Jennifer Williamson
“My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: He believed in me.” – Jim Valvano
“Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example instead of his advice.” – Charles F. Kettering
“My father always used to say that when you die, if you’ve got five real friends, then you’ve had a great life.” – Lee Iacocca
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” – Umberto Eco
“He adopted a role called being a father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a protector.” – Tom Wolfe
“Now there is one thing I can tell you: You will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power … that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.” – Marcel Proust
Grief Quotes For Friend
“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
“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
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure … And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“An eternal memory…until we meet again: Those special memories will always bring a smile if only I could have you back for just a little while. Then we could sit and talk again just like we used to do, you always meant so very much and always will do too. The fact that you’re no longer here will always cause me pain, but you’re forever in my heart until we meet again.”
Grief And Loss Quotes
“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
“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
“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.” – Joan Didion
“There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.” – Lou Reed, ‘Magic And Loss’
“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
“The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief – But the pain of grief isonly a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.” – Hillary Stanton Zunin
“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.” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” – Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“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
“My mom has experienced a lot of loss in her life and she told me at one point, there is an empowerment that comes with grief—at some point you find it. It’s very hard but you will find it, and I think at a certain point you can choose to sort of fall from this or you can choose to rise. And that’s what I’m just trying to do my best for him, because I know that that’s what he would have.” – Lea Michele
“Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature’s delight.” – Marcus Aurelius
“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
“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
“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”
“Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.” – Paulo Coelho
“I don’t know why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every part of my body is broken too.” – Chloe Woodward
“I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it’s there and keep falling in. After a while, it’s still there, but you learn to walk round it.” – Rachel Joyce
“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
“Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.” – Alphonse de Lamartine
Grief And Love Quotes
“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” – Jeanette Winterson
“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
“When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure.”
“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.” – Helen Keller
“What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller
“We get no choice. If we love, we grieve.” – Thomas Lynch
“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
“To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.” – J.K. Rowling
“Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us every day…unseen, unheard, but always near, still loved, still missed, and very dear.”
“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
“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” – E.A. Bucchianeri
“Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy.” – Eskimo legend
“People speak to me about my son — ‘I’m so sorry for you’ — but no one says, ‘I loved him so much.’ I was busy in grief, which I don’t expect to stop. Suddenly realizing that the last thing my son would want was for me to be very self-involved and narcissistic and self-stroking. It stopped me from writing. Which doesn’t mean you stop feeling the absence. It was being willing to think about it in a way that was not self-serving.” – Toni Morrison
“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
“My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love.”
“Love is like standing in wet cement, the longer you stay the harder to leave and you can never leave without leaving your marks behind.”
“Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.” – Orson Scott Card
“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.” – From a headstone in Ireland
“Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tell us to tell each other right now that we love each other.” – Leo Buscaglia
“Be the things you loved most about the people who are gone.”
“Although it’s natural to forget your power after you lose a loved one, the truth is that after a breakup, divorce, or death, there remains an ability within you to create a new reality.” – Louise Hay And David Kessler
“Accepting death doesn’t mean you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, ‘Why do people die?’ and ‘Why is this happening to me?’ Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.” – Caitlin Doughty
“A life with love will have some thorns, but a life without love will have no roses.” – Anonymous
“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
“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” – Marcel Proust
“Honest listening is one of the best medicines we can offer the dying and the bereaved.” – Jean Cameron
“I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it’s there and keep falling in. After a while, it’s still there, but you learn to walk round it.” – Rachel Joyce
“If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart, I’ll stay there forever.” – Winnie the Pooh
“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
“In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods of tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life.” – Nicholas Sparks
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.” – Leo Tolstoy
“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.”
“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
“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
Dealing With Grief Quotes
“You don’t go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.” – Nigella Lawson
“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
“Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.” – Julie Burchill
“If you’ve got to my age, you’ve probably had your heart broken many times. So it’s not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it.” – Emma Thompson
“Although it’s difficult today to see beyond the sorrow, May looking back in memory help comfort you tomorrow.”
“You have within you, right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.”
“Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.” – Albert Camus
“All you need is one safe anchor to keep you grounded when the rest of your life spins out of control.” – Katie Kacvinsky
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This post provides general educational information from mental health professionals, but you should not substitute information on the quote.cc website for professional advice.