Despite being a universal part of our human experience, death, especially that of someone we love, can leave us feeling devastated.

Anyone faced with great loss feels as if a part of them has been torn away.

After someone passes away, those left behind are tasked with carrying on their lives. But for us to go on with our lives, we need to let go of those we love who are no longer with us.

Grief is that process that helps us gradually accept the loss and allow the dead to be gone from our lives but always remembered.

Because although a loved one may be gone, you can keep their memory and legacy alive by celebrating their life.

You can honor the life and memory of the deceased in many different ways, including keeping something of theirs with you, supporting a cause close to their heart, making a tribute donation to a nonprofit, dedicating an event to their memory, sharing their stories and photos, and living your best life.

To help commemorate and remember the deceased, below is our collection of inspirational and uplifting grief quotes, grief sayings, and grief proverbs, collected from a variety of sources over the years.

If you’re a woman who’s had to go through the painful experience of a miscarriage, also check out our collection of comforting miscarriage quotes.

Grief quotes celebrating the life of someone who passed away

1.  “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” — C.S. Lewis

2. ”We need to grieve the ones we have loved and lost in this lifetime — not to sustain our connection to suffering, but to sustain our connection to love.” – J. W.

3. ”To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” – Thomas Campbell

4. ”Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” – Vicki Harrison

5. ”What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller

6. ”When we lose someone we love we must learn not to live without them, but to live with the love they left behind.” – Anonymous

7. ”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

8. ”Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that’s just given.” – Kay Redfield Jamison

9. ”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

10. ”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. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.” – Maya Angelou

Grief quotes to bring healing and peace

11. ”Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature’s delight.” – Marcus Aurelius

12. ”If I can see pain in your eyes then share with me your tears. If I can see joy in your eyes then share with me your smile.” – Santosh Kalwar

13. ”Grief is the price we pay for love.” – Queen Elizabeth II

14. ”The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief – But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.” – Hilary Stanton Zunin

15. ”We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” – Kenji Miyazawa

16.“Grief is just love with no place to go.” — Jamie Anderson

17. ”I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone-you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.” – Alyson Noel

18. ”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

19. ”Grief I’ve learned is just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” – Anonymous

20. ”To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.” — J.K. Rowling

Also, read these profound tombstone quotes about being remembered.

Grief quotes to help heal your heart and strengthen you

21. “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” — Winnie the Pooh

22. ”Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” – Megan Devine

23. ”I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

24. ”Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.” – Rumi

25. ”Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.” – José N. Harris

26. ”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

27. ”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

28. ”Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.” – Sarah Dessen

29. ”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
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of divorce quotes that will help you get through the pain of separation.

30. ”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

Grief quotes to help commemorate and remember the deceased

31. ”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.” – Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of quotes about losing a loved one to help you express the feelings behind loss.

32. ”You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.” – Neil Gaiman

33. ”No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn’t stop for your grief.” – Faraaz Kazi

34. ”Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. You follow it a far as you can go. But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.” – Philip K. Dick

35. ”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

36. ”Acceptance is not about liking a situation. It is about acknowledging all that has been lost and learning to live with that loss.” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler

37. ”See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.” – Jodi Picoult

38. ”All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.” – Nicole Krauss

39. ”How long will you grieve? How long will they be dead?” – David Kessler

40. ”The only way to end grief was to go through it.” – Holly Black

You might also like these comforting rest in peace quotes to help you grieve.

Grief quotes on coping and life after loss

41. ”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

42. ”Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.” – Anne Roiphe

43. ”I learned that, with grief, you have to take it one day at a time and learn how to find the happiness amid the heartbreak.” – Adrienne C. Moore
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of heart break quotes about moving on from a break up.

44. ”It takes strength to make your way through grief, to grab hold of life and let it pull you forward.” – Patti Davis

45. ”Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.” – Xenophon

46. ”During my days of deepest grief, in all of my shock, sorrow and struggle, I sat at the feet of God. I literally spent hours each day reading God’s word, meditating on scripture and praying. I intentionally spent a significant amount of time being still before God.” – Rick Warren

47. ”Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” – Marcel Proust

48. ”Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn’t serve anyone, and it’s painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you’re magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.” – Patti Smith

49. ”Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.” – Albert Camus

50. ”Loss can remind us that life itself is a gift.” – Louise Hay and David Kessler

Grief quotes to strengthen you

51. “When you lose your parents, the sadness doesn’t go away. It just changes. It hits you sideways sometimes instead of head-on. Like now.”― Jude Watson

52. “Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it.”― Stephen Levine

53. “Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.”― Elizabeth McCracken

54. “Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.”― V.C. Andrews

55. “What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.”― Gail Caldwell

56. “Ten years, she’s dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.”― Mary Karr

57. “Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner’s loss.”
― Orson Scott Card

58. “Grief wraps around people, takes them to a place they would not go otherwise.”― Patti Callahan Henry

59. “In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.” — Emily Giffin

60. “So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” ― E.A. Bucchianeri

61. “For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.”― Lurlene McDaniel

62. “Loss is only temporary when you believe in God!”― Latoya Alston

63. “Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.”― Sophocles

64. “The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”― Cormac McCarthy

65. “When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.”― Rosamund Lupton

You might also like these helpful death quotes on the ways we grieve.

Grief quotes to help cope with lose of a loved one

66. “People in grief need someone to walk with them without judging them.” – Gail Sheehy

67. “Never let the salt of your tears be tasteless in grief.”― Munia Khan

68. “Everybody has their burdens, their grief that they carry with them.” – Elizabeth Edwards

69. “Never compare your grief.
You – and only you
walk your path.”― Nathalie Himmelrich

70. “Grief releases love and it also instills a profound sense of connection.” – Jacqueline Novogratz

71. “There’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.”― Jonathan Tropper

72. “Your grief path is yours alone, and no one else can walk it, and no one else can understand it.” – Terri Irwin

73. “We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in order to determine the provision made within it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

74. “Acknowledgment of grief – well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder.” – Elizabeth McCracken

75. “The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?”― Philip K. Dick

Grief quotes to make you strong

76. “I don’t move away from grief, rather through it.” – Taya Kyle

77. “Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.”― Hisham Matar

78. “Grief is bizarre territory because there’s no predicting how long it’ll take to get over certain things. You just don’t know how long it’s going to resound in your life.” – Sam Shepard

79. “People come and go from our lives all the time. It’s not our fault that people leave. The Universe is just making room for new people with new lessons.”― Sue Fitzmaurice

80. “When grief is deepest, words are fewest.” – Ann Voskamp

81. “My mind couldn’t fit itself around the shape of his absence.”― Lia Mills

82. “You don’t go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.” – Nigella Lawson

83. “All you need is one safe anchor to keep you grounded when the rest of your life spins out of control.”― Katie Kacvinsky

84. “The only cure for grief is action.” – George Henry Lewes

85. “Even when it seems that there is no one else, always remember there’s one person who never ceased to love you – yourself.”― Sanhita Baruah

Grief quotes to condole with

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “To weep is to make less the depth of grief.” — William Shakespeare

90. “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

91. “Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.” — Orson Scott Card

92. “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

93. “Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.” — Alphonse de Lamartine

94. “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”― John Green

95. “A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.” — Maya Angelou

Grief quotes to help deal with loss and pain

96. “They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.” – Cassandra Clare

97. “Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.” – Veronica Roth

98. “Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.” ― Euripides

99. “Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.” – Andrew Solomon

If you’re enjoying these quotes, you’ll love our collection of powerful depression quotes that will provide perspective.

100. “Love is an engraved invitation to grief.” – Sunshine O’Donnell

101. “Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn’t yours. But grief comes from losing something you’ve already had.” – Jodi Picoult

102. “Grieving doesn’t make you imperfect. It makes you human.” – Sarah Dessen

103. “Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.” – David Mitchell

104. “There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

105. “It’s not life situations but our thoughts are the pilots of grief.” – Durgesh Satpathy

Other grief quotes and sayings

106. “When the heart is grieving, it can help to remember that sorrow doesn’t last forever. Love does.” – Unknown

107. “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

108. “When it feels as though nothing will ease your grief, hold on to the belief that every new sunrise brings you closer to comfort.” – Unknown

109. “In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.”- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

110. “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” — John Steinbeck

111.  “The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

112. “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

113. “Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.” ― Jodi Picoult

114. “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…” – Arthur Golden

115.  “You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.” — J.K. Rowling

Which of these grief quotes resonated with you best?

Though it can be particularly difficult if the individual was a family member or a close friend, grieving after a loss is healthy and completely necessary.

As long as we are mortal, death and grief happen. And despite being a painful experience, grieving is a natural way for us to grow stronger and more resilient.

Hopefully, the above grief quotes will help you not only honor your loved one but also heal your heart and strengthen you. Do you have any other uplifting grief quotes to add? Let us know in the comment section below.

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