You're not alone in your suffering. Regardless of the cause of your pain, you can emerge stronger than ever—and these broken-heart quotes can help.
39 Wise Broken-Heart Quotes That Will Help You Feel Whole Again
Updated on Nov. 27, 2024
Comforting broken-heart quotes
1. “Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart do not know how to laugh either.” —Golda Meir
2. “Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history but not a part of your destiny.” —Steve Maraboli
3. “There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream—whatever that dream might be.” —Pearl S. Buck
4. “To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose is the next best.” —William Makepeace Thackeray
5. “In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.” —Robert Frost
6. “Hearts live by being wounded.” —Oscar Wilde
7. “Sometimes you have to unfollow people in real life.” —Unknown
8. “The tears of my eyes watered your heart but failed to evoke a response from the barren grounds of what beats in you. They will still come and I will welcome them because they contain you.” —Faraaz Kazi
9. “In time I will fade away. In time I won’t hear what you say. In time, but time takes time you know.” —Ben Folds
10. “Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.” —Haruki Murakami
11. “Don’t dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energy moving forward together towards an answer.” —Denis Waitley
12. “Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning, and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.” —Elizabeth Gilbert
13. “Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus.” —Wallace Stegner
Inspiring broken-heart quotes
14, “Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.” —Emily Dickinson
15. “Cry. Forgive. Learn. Move on. Let your tears water the seeds of your future happiness.” —Steve Maraboli
16. “The shattering of a heart when being broken is the loudest quiet ever.” —Carroll Bryant
17. “Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.” —H. L. Mencken
18. Nothing helps a broken heart like having someone wonderful give you theirs.” —Rita Stradling
19. “Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.” —Stephen King
20. “The greatest tragedy of life is not that men perish but that they cease to love.” —W. Somerset Maugham
21. “Lips that taste of tears, they say, are the best for kissing.” —Dorothy Parker
22. “The human heart is the only thing whose worth increases the more it is broken.” —Shakieb Orgunwall
23. “When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure.” —Unknown
24. “The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it.” —Nicholas Sparks
25. “Perhaps someday I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.” —Sylvia Plath
26. “A heartbreak is a blessing from God. It’s just his way of letting you realize he saved you from the wrong one.” —Unknown
27. “To make real friends, you have to put yourself out there. Sometimes people will let you down—girls can be really mean to each other—but you can’t let that stop you. If you get hurt, you just pick yourself up, dust off your feelings, and try again.” —Kristin Hannah
Quotes about heartbreak
28. “I’ve been heartbroken. I’ve broken hearts. That’s part of life, and it’s part of figuring out who you are so you can find the right partner.” —Heidi Klum
29. “To be rejected by someone doesn’t mean you should also reject yourself or that you should think of yourself as a lesser person. It doesn’t mean that nobody will ever love you anymore. Remember that only one person has rejected you at the moment, and it only hurt so much because to you, that person’s opinion symbolized the opinion of the whole world, of God.” —Jocelyn Soriano
30. “It takes a lot of strength to mend a broken heart. Being able to accept situations for what they are instead of questioning them helps immensely.” —Deepika Padukone
31. “When love is lost, do not bow your head in sadness; instead, keep your head up high and gaze into heaven, for that is where your broken heart has been sent to heal.” —Unknown
32. “These tears do me good, they have watered the parched place; perhaps my heart will grow again there!” —George Sand
33. “Sometimes your heart needs more time to accept what your mind already knows.” —Unknown
34. “A broken heart in real life isn’t half as dreadful as it is in books. […] It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.” —L.M. Montgomery
35. “If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.” —Rabindranath Tagore
36. “Breakups have a way of shaking us awake and helping us see we are worth so much more than we’re settling for.” —Mandy Hale
37. “Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it but also the father who wipes away the tears.” —Criss Jami
38. “When you are standing in [a] 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
39. “Real love brings pain. Real love means sacrifices and hurts and all the thousand shocks of life. But it also means beauty, true beauty.” —Anne Elisabeth Stengl
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite quotes for over 100 years. The sayings and quips that appear in the magazine’s “Quotable Quotes” (formerly “Remarkable Remarks”) are curated from interviews and essays originally published in the magazine, reprints from trusted titles and other verified sources. For this piece on broken-heart quotes, Charlotte Hilton Anderson tapped her experiences as a reporter and journalist for Reader’s Digest to ensure that all information is accurate. We’ve gone the extra step and had Sharon Boone, a fact-checker with 20-plus years of experience researching for national publications including Glamour, Seventeen, Essence, AARP and more, verify that all quotes are attributed correctly and have credible sourcing. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
