Last Updated on December 19, 2022
Everyone has, and will continue to, experience their fair share of life’s low moments. In fact, it’s almost unfathomable to go through life without facing some form of adversity.
Adversity is nature’s most precious tool to help sharpen our mental resilience and tenacity. The dreadful experiences we go through during our worst moments can embolden us to approach life with a renewed sense of confidence and optimism. These experiences serve as a constant reminder that what doesn’t kill us can indeed only make us stronger.
Most importantly, adversity enables us to appreciate life’s happy moments. It’s only by losing the people we love that we can truly appreciate the gift of life, which we so often take for granted. Or by losing our long-held jobs that we’ll fully grasp the gravity of unemployment. The sad experiences we endure during life’s most tumultuous moments help us nurture a culture of gratitude. We learn to embrace the often-uncomfortable fact that we’re blessed no matter what our present circumstances may be.
But as Herman Melville rightly opined, nothing in this world exists in itself. All qualities in life exist merely by contrast. The presence of light depends on the absence of darkness, virtue on the absence of vice, progress on the absence of stagnation, etc. Similarly, the existence of sadness depends on the absence of happiness.
Another exciting fact about life is that no situation is permanent. Fortunes can change in an instant. And the best part is that the universe is comically unpredictable. You could be wallowing in poverty or grief today but be smiling in joy the following day. You might also lose your long-term romantic partner today, only for the universe to pair you with your true soul mate the following day. As the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining.
It’s life’s fleeting nature that makes every sad moment worth bearing. No matter how difficult the times may be, we can always look to the future with a sense of hope and optimism. And when it appears as though the veil of sadness has hung over our heads for far too long, we can rest assured that it’s all but for a spell.
However, since we’re only human, we may not always manage to rise above life’s difficult moments. You’ll find yourself being overcome by adversity once in a while. But that’s when you know you need a sadness quote.
Quotes about sadness are not only meant to give you the feels. They also help you embrace your life’s situation. Remember, acceptance is the first step towards healing. Most importantly, sadness quotes can serve as a reminder of how transient life’s circumstances can be. As you shall find, many adversity quotes do not dwell on low moments. Instead, they offer a ray of hope on what lies beyond the tunnel.
Sad Quotes
If you’re looking for the perfect sadness quotes to help you endure trying moments, you’re in luck. Listed below are 100+ sad quotes to help you cope with adversity.
- “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
- “Trauma lives in the sea of my body, awash in the waters of forgetting.” — Natasha Trethewey
- “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
- “When grief is deepest, words are fewest.” — Ann Voskamp
- “I am crazy sad, and somewhere deep inside, all I want is to fly.” — Jandy Nelson
- “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
- “Life can be challenging and sad… but music is the easy part.” — St. Vincent
- “I don’t even remember why I’m wasting all these tears on you.” — Cassadee Pope
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Sadness flies away on the wings of time.” — Jean de La Fontaine
- “If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.” — Sylvia Plath
- “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
- “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me.” — Franz Kafka
- “Nothing always stays the same. You don’t stay happy forever. You don’t stay sad forever.” — Cat Zingano
- “I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath.” — Dante Alighieri
- “Everything takes me longer than I expect. It’s the sad truth about life.” — Donna Tart
- “You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.” — Suzanne Collins
- “I’m not a sad person, upset the whole time, but I seem to be quite emotional.” — Freddie Highmore
- “You had me at hello.” — Jerry Maguire
- “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
- “Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.” — Kahlil Gibran
- “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.” — Ernest Hemingway
- “It’s okay to be sad if things don’t go the way you had hoped.” — Jessie James Decker
- “I pretend I’m not hurt, I walk about the world like I’m having fun.” — Lana Del Rey
- “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
- “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
- “We had nothing to lose and lost it anyway.” — Joy Harjo
- “Memories always win, and with them comes a demon that is even more terrifying than melancholy: Remorse.” — Paulo Coelho
- “We must understand that sadness is an ocean, and sometimes we drown, while other days we are forced to swim.” — R.M. Drake
- “We can feel sad, hurt, demoralized. But we can’t give up.” — Patrisse Cullors
- “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
- “No, I like you very much. Just as you are.” — Bridget Jones’ Diary
- “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
- “Oh, I am very weary, though tears no longer flow; my eyes are tired of weeping, my heart is sick of woe.” — Anne Bronte
- “I spent my life weighed down by a stone heart, drowning in irony and settling for anything.” — The Wonder Years
- “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
- “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
- “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.” —
- “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
- “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
- “It’s hard to watch your life unfold, and sad. Life changes.” — Cilla Black
- “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” — Rollo May
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Everything dies, from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest galaxy.” — Stephen R. Donaldson
- “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
- “I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.” — Sylvia Plath
- “I understand that nobody understands me, but I can’t be someone I’m not.” — Audrey Tautou
- “I think I’m afraid of being happy because whenever I get too happy something bad always happens.” — Charles M. Schulz
- “The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” — Carl Jung
- “Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative you can get beyond your pain or negativity.” — Yoko Ono
- “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” — Moulin Rouge
- “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
- “I’m scared you will realize I’m just bones and questions and leave me for something solid.” — Clementine Von Radics
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Delicious tears! The heart’s own dew.” — Letitia Elizabeth Landon
- “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
- “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
- “You is kind, you is smart, you is important.” — The Help
- “Most of life is sad.” — Guy Lafleur
- “Tears are nature’s lotion for the eyes. The eyes see better for being washed by them.” — Christian Nestell Bovee
- “And in real life endings aren’t always neat, whether they’re happy endings, or whether they’re sad endings.” — Stephen King
- “Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.” — Mark Slouka
- “I do believe that if you haven’t learnt about sadness, you cannot appreciate happiness.” — Nana Mouskouri
- “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
- “Time does not heal all wounds; there are those that remain painfully open.” — Elie Wiesel
- “I wish I knew how to quit you.” — Brokeback Mountain
- “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
- “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
- “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.
- “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
- “Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.” — Alice Hoffman
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” — Jonathan Safran Foer
- “Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.” — Jeffrey Eugenides
- “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
- “It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.” — Miguel de Unamuno
- “On the shore of the wide world I stand alone.” — John Keats
- “I wish I could give you my pain just for one moment so you can understand how much you hurt me.” — Mohsen El-guindy
- “Break my heart. Break it a thousand times if you like. It was only ever yours to break anyway.” — Kiera Cass
- “The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.” — Nikolai Gogol
- “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
- “Nobody loves you like I do.” — Stepmom
- “So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” — E.A. Bucchianeri
- “I’d forgotten how much feelings hurt.” — Elizabeth Scott
- “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
- “My heart is so tired.” — Markus Zusak
- “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
- “A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.” — John Steinbeck
- “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
- “Tears are words the mouth can’t say nor can the heart bear.” — Joshua Wisenbaker