Parenting

100+ Poignant And Sad Quotes That Will Make You Feel All the Feels

by Team Scary Mommy
Updated: 
Originally Published: 
sad quotes
Matthew Henry/ Burst

Feeling a little blue? That’s normal! Sometimes we feel sad and we want to feel all the feels, be alone, let the emotions wash over us, and maybe even have a good cry. It’s cathartic and healing and so human. So if you need some sad quotes or quotes about grief to describe all that you’re feeling, we got you.

Feeling sad is just as natural as being happy. It’s important to take the time to understand your feelings and work them out. Feeling down in the dumps is something we can all relate to, so don’t be afraid, to be honest about your emotions with someone you trust. A few ways to help you deal with your bad mood are to journal, spend time with family and friends, or listen to music. Exercise is also a great way to get motivated and boost positive energy. There is no shame in having a solo dance party or putting on a cheesy movie. Laughter is a medicine that can help pull you out of any funk.

Sometimes sadness is a solitary experience, and sometimes it’s communal. The entire global community united in grief, despair, and even hopelessness as the COVID-19 pandemic changed life as we know it at the start of 2020. Millions of lost loved ones and people searching for ways to cope and move forward. One of the most comforting aspects of grief is knowing there are others you can speak and share your pain with. These quotes below are more than somber phrases about sadness. They’re words you can use to connect with others and express sorrow.

Below is our curated list of the saddest sad quotes to help you with the blues.

And when you’ve turned the corner and are in need of some motivation, comfort, friendship, or self-care, we have you covered on that front as well.

RELATED: 100+ Hilarious Life Quotes Dripping With Sarcasm And Wit

  1. “The saddest word in the whole wide world is the word, almost. He was almost in love. She was almost too good for him. He almost stopped her. She almost waited. He almost lived. They almost made it.” — Nikita Gill
  2. “Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts.” — Paramahansa Yogananda
  3. “Sadness flies away on the wings of time.” — Jean de La Fontaine
  4. “If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.” — Sylvia Plath
  5. “Please boss, don’t put that thing over my face, don’t put me in the dark. I’s afraid of the dark.” — The Green Mile
  6. “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
  7. “I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me.” — Franz Kafka
  8. “Nothing always stays the same. You don’t stay happy forever. You don’t stay sad forever.” — Cat Zingano
  9. “I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath.” — Dante Alighieri
  10. “Everything takes me longer than I expect. It’s the sad truth about life.” — Donna Tart
  11. “You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.” — Suzanne Collins
  12. “I’m not a sad person, upset the whole time, but I seem to be quite emotional.” — Freddie Highmore
  13. “You had me at hello.” — Jerry Maguire
  14. “It’s time to say goodbye, but I think goodbyes are sad and I’d much rather say hello. Hello to a new adventure.” — Ernie Harwell
  15. “Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.” — Kahlil Gibran
  16. “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.” — Ernest Hemingway
  17. “It’s okay to be sad if things don’t go the way you had hoped.” — Jessie James Decker
  18. “I pretend I’m not hurt, I walk about the world like I’m having fun.” — Lana Del Rey
  19. “Well, I’m gonna get out of bed every morning… breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won’t have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out… and, then after a while, I won’t have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while.” — Sleepless in Seattle
  20. “For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.” — Reba McEntire
  21. “We had nothing to lose and lost it anyway.” — Joy Harjo
  22. “Memories always win, and with them comes a demon that is even more terrifying than melancholy: Remorse.” — Paulo Coelho
  23. “We must understand that sadness is an ocean, and sometimes we drown, while other days we are forced to swim.” — R.M. Drake
  24. “We can feel sad, hurt, demoralized. But we can’t give up.” — Patrisse Cullors
  25. “Every human walks around with a certain kind of sadness. They may not wear it on their sleeves, but it’s there if you look deep.” — Taraji P. Henson
  26. “No, I like you very much. Just as you are.” — Bridget Jones’ Diary
  27. “Grief is never something you get over. You don’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I’ve conquered that; now I’m moving on.’ It’s something that walks beside you every day. And if you can learn how to manage it and honour the person that you miss, you can take something that is incredibly sad and have some form of positivity.” — Terri Irwin
  28. “Oh, I am very weary, though tears no longer flow; my eyes are tired of weeping, my heart is sick of woe.” — Anne Bronte
  29. “I spent my life weighed down by a stone heart, drowning in irony and settling for anything.” — The Wonder Years
  30. “There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have the feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well.” — Nicholas Sparks
  31. “People who have never dealt with depression think it’s just being sad or being in a bad mood. That’s not what depression is for me; it’s falling into a state of grayness and numbness.” — Dan Reynolds
  32. “Everything dies, from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest galaxy.” — Stephen R. Donaldson
  33. “You may not enjoy loneliness, because loneliness is sad. But solitude is something else; solitude is what you look forward to when you want to be alone, when you want to be with yourself. So, solitude is something we all need from time to time.” — Ruskin Bond
  34. “I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.” — Sylvia Plath
  35. “I don’t want to be overdramatic, but today felt like a hundred years in hell and the absolute worst day of my life.” — Parks and Rec
  36. “Trauma lives in the sea of my body, awash in the waters of forgetting.” — Natasha Trethewey
  37. “How do I control my emotions? How do I stop getting angry so often, or how do I stop being sad? And I think there’s a really important distinction to understand is that you can’t completely control your emotions. What you control is your reaction to your own emotions. And a lot of people don’t ever make that separation for what goes on with them.” — Mark Manson
  38. “When grief is deepest, words are fewest.” — Ann Voskamp
  39. “I am crazy sad, and somewhere deep inside, all I want is to fly.” — Jandy Nelson
  40. “I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don’t think that’s only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings. I think it really exists and is part of the human condition. I think in the course of your life you figure out ways to deal with that.” — Kevin Bacon
  41. “Life can be challenging and sad… but music is the easy part.” — St. Vincent
  42. “I don’t even remember why I’m wasting all these tears on you.” — Cassadee Pope
  43. “The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives – the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.” — Norman Cousins
  44. “Poetry is a beautiful way of expressing feelings – happy, sad, angry, caring. It’s also a way that we share with other people, to help them with those feelings.” — Mattie Stepanek
  45. “I understand that nobody understands me, but I can’t be someone I’m not.” — Audrey Tautou
  46. “I think I’m afraid of being happy because whenever I get too happy something bad always happens.” — Charles M. Schulz
  47. “The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” — Carl Jung
  48. “Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative you can get beyond your pain or negativity.” — Yoko Ono
  49. “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” — Moulin Rouge
  50. “There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.” — Barbara Kingsolver
  51. “I’m scared you will realize I’m just bones and questions and leave me for something solid.” — Clementine Von Radics
  52. “I’ve cried, and you’d think I’d be better for it, but the sadness just sleeps, and it stays in my spine the rest of my life.” — Conor Oberst
  53. “When you feel sad, it’s okay. It’s not the end of the world. Everyone has those days when you doubt yourself, and when you feel like everything you do sucks, but then there’s those days when you feel like Superman. It’s just the balance of the world. I just write to feel better.” — Mac Miller
  54. “Maybe it’s all gonna turn out all right. And I know that it’s not, but I have to believe that it is.” — Julien Bake
  55. “It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
  56. “Delicious tears! The heart’s own dew.” — Letitia Elizabeth Landon
  57. “Deep in her secret heart, in the pure place she protects, she is afraid she will always be alone — that she will go through life without being known. And she will not survive that.” — Rene Denfeld
  58. “The day exhausts me, irritates me. It is brutal, noisy. I struggle to get out of bed, I dress wearily and, against my inclination, I go out. I find each step, each movement, each gesture, each word, each thought as tiring as if I were lifting a crushing weight.” — Guy de Maupassant
  59. “You is kind, you is smart, you is important.” — The Help
  60. “Most of life is sad.” — Guy Lafleur
  61. “Tears are nature’s lotion for the eyes. The eyes see better for being washed by them.” — Christian Nestell Bovee
  62. “And in real life endings aren’t always neat, whether they’re happy endings, or whether they’re sad endings.” — Stephen King
  63. “Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.” — Mark Slouka
  64. “I do believe that if you haven’t learnt about sadness, you cannot appreciate happiness.” — Nana Mouskouri
  65. “Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts, but it’s a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.” — J.K. Rowling
  66. “Time does not heal all wounds; there are those that remain painfully open.” — Elie Wiesel
  67. “I wish I knew how to quit you.” — Brokeback Mountain
  68. “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
  69. “Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don’t know why we are sad, so we say we aren’t sad but we really are.” — Mark Haddon
  70. “We’re trying to say that if you, in love, when you’re not true to yourself, the love won’t last. Because love is complex, and we always have the dark sides and the sad sides.” — R.M.
  71. “Everyone can have their heart broken. Even if you know the relationship isn’t working, it’s still sad. Even in a bad relationship, they’re part of your life for a long time, and saying goodbye to that can be difficult.” — James Marsden
  72. “Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.” — Alice Hoffman
  73. “Can I see another’s woe and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another’s grief and not seek for kind relief?” — William Blake
  74. “It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.” — Deborah Harkness
  75. “Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding. My feet felt rooted in the dirt. There were more than two bodies buried here. Pieces of me that I didn’t even know were under the ground. Pieces of dad, too.” — Laurie Halse Anderson
  76. “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” — Jonathan Safran Foer
  77. “Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.” — Jeffrey Eugenides
  78. “We look before and after, and pine for what is not; our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught; our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
  79. “It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.” — Miguel de Unamuno
  80. “On the shore of the wide world I stand alone.” — John Keats
  81. “I wish I could give you my pain just for one moment so you can understand how much you hurt me.” — Mohsen El-guindy
  82. “Break my heart. Break it a thousand times if you like. It was only ever yours to break anyway.” — Kiera Cass
  83. “The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.” — Nikolai Gogol
  84. “There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human — in not having to be just happy or just sad — in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.” — C. Joybell
  85. “Nobody loves you like I do.” — Stepmom
  86. “So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” — E.A. Bucchianeri
  87. “I’d forgotten how much feelings hurt.” — Elizabeth Scott
  88. “The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.” — Alain de Botton
  89. “My heart is so tired.” — Markus Zusak
  90. “Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.” — Henry David Thoreau
  91. “A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.” — John Steinbeck
  92. “Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.” — Osho
  93. “Tears are words the mouth can’t say nor can the heart bear.” — Joshua Wisenbaker
  94. “The odds are high that the best of me has already been ripped away and that if I don’t keep hold of myself, I will lose what’s left.” — Laure Wiess
  95. “Don’t be ashamed to weep; ’tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.” — Brian Jacques
  96. “You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.” — Azar Nafisi
  97. “I don’t want to care. If I care about things, it’ll just be worse, it’ll just be another thing to worry about. It’s less painful if I don’t care.” — Bret Easton Ellis
  98. “It’s hard to watch your life unfold, and sad. Life changes.” — Cilla Black
  99. “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” — Rollo May
  100. “Feeling sad or lonely isn’t a bad thing. But those emotions increase the risk that you’ll cross the line into self pity.” — Amy Morin
  101. “Some days are just bad days, that’s all. You have to experience sadness to know happiness, and I remind myself that not every day is going to be a good day, that’s just the way it is!” — Dita Von Teese

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