70 Inspirational Quotes on Grief and Loss to Help You Cope With
Quotes On Grief and Loss
“Grief is itself a medicine.” —William Cowper
“Grief is a species of idleness.” —Samuel Johnson
“Even hundredfold grief is divisible by love.” —Terri Guillemets
“Grief is light that is capable of counsel.” —Proverb
“All things grow with time, except grief.” —Jewish Proverb
“Time takes away the grief of men.” —Desiderius Erasmus
“One often calms one’s grief by recounting it.” —Pierre Corneille
“The only cure for grief is action.” —George Henry Lewis
“For some moments in life there are no words.” —David Seltzer
“If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.” —Moliere
“Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.” —James Martineau
“Grief is love not wanting to let go.” —Earl A. Grollman
“There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.” —Henry Wordsworth
“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.” —C.S. Lewis
“Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.” —Walker Percy
“No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.” —E.M. Cioran
“And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief.” —William Cullen Bryant
“Grief is the agony of an instant. The indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.” —Benjamin Disraeli
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” —William Shakespeare
“Sorrow makes us all children again – destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“When the heart grieves over what is has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.” —Sufi Epigram
“The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.” —Seneca
“He wept, and it felt as if the tears were cleansing him, as if his body needed to empty itself.” —Lois Lowry
“Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.” —Jean De La Bruyere
“Grieving is a necessary passage and a difficult transition to finally letting go of sorrow – it is not a permanent rest stop.” —Dodinsky
“Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.” —Alphonse De Lamartine
“He sought to transform the grief that looks down into the grave by showing it the grief that looks up to the stars.” —Victor Hugo
“I measure every grief I meet with narrow, probing eyes – I wonder if it weighs like mine – or has an easier size.” —Emily Dickinson
“Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.” —Seneca
“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
“She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.” —George Eliot
“Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves. . . . Grief makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world.” —Joan Chittister
“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
“Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words.” —William Shakespeare
“Grief will happen either as an open healing wound or a closed festering wound, either honestly or dishonestly, either appropriately or inappropriately. But emotions will be expressed.” —Elisabeth Kubler Ross
“One of the most important things we can do for people who are grieving is to give them a safe place in which to experience and express their pain —J. Nelson
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? —Kahlil Gibran
“As much as it hurts, suppressing how you feel is like putting a lid on a pressure cooker and turning off the steam valve, eventually it will blow. By expressing your emotions, you start the healing process.” —M. Hunter
“No one is immune to grief. There are those amongst us today who have grieved deeply in the past, and there are those who are grieving deeply now and sadly. All of us will grieve at some time in the future.” —Lorraine Kember
“Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.” —Anne Lamott
“Grieving is a journey that teaches us how to love in a new way now that our loved one is no longer with us. Consciously remembering those who have died is the key that opens the hearts that allows us to love them in new ways.” —Tom Attig
“Most people move though grief at their own unique pace and many eventually find a peaceful acceptance. This does not mean that this terrible loss is “OK”, but rather that one is no longer battling reality and has come to a place of acceptance of what is.” —Marsha Barnosky
“Grief is like the wind. When it’s blowing hard, you adjust your sails and run before it. If it blows too hard, you stay in the harbor, close the hatches and don’t take calls. When it’s gentle, you go sailing, have a picnic, and take a swim.” —Barbara Lazear Ascher
“Grief – Happiness is to feel that one’s soul is good; there is no other, in truth, and this kind of happiness may exist even in sorrow, so that there are griefs perfable to every joy, and such as would be preferred by all those who have felt them.” —Joseph Joubert
“The reality is that we don’t forget, move on, and have closure, but rather we honor, we remember, and incorporate our deceased children and siblings into our lives in a new way. In fact, keeping memories of your loved one alive in your mind and heart is an important part of your healing journey.” —Harriet Schiff
“Grief seems to me like a winter house: guarded, sheltered against an outside world that’s expected to be difficult. The windows are small to keep out the cold, and little light gets in. The darkness and warmth make a cozy place to hide, to nurse wounds, to incubate what is not yet ready to be exposed.” —Janet Cedar Spring
“You give yourself permission to grieve by recognizing the need for grieving. Grieving is the natural way of working through the loss of a love. Grieving is not weakness nor absence of faith. Grieving is as natural as crying when you are hurt, sleeping when you are tired or sneezing when your nose itches. It is nature’s way of healing a broken heart.” —Doug Manning
“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
“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
Inspirational Quotes on Grief and Loss
“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” —John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“Real grief is not healed by time…If time does anything, it deepens our grief.”
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
“What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” —Helen Keller
“Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.” ―Paulo Coelho, Author of The Alchemist
“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
“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
“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, Kafka on the Shore
“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, Message in a Bottle
“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, The Music Lesson
“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.”
“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
“It is as if the intensity of grief fused the distance between you and the dead. Or perhaps, in reality, part of one dies. Like Orpheus, one tries to follow the dead on the beginning of their journey. But one cannot, like Orpheus, go all the way, and after a long journey, one comes back. If one is lucky, one is reborn.” —Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“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
“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.” —Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
“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, A Prayer for Owen Meany
“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, Odd Hours