When you experience a broken heart, it may feel like the world is crashing down around you and nothing will ever be the same again. Heartbreak can be one of the worst experiences there is – the most all-consuming hurt, the most memorable pain. The feeling can follow you for the rest of your life.
At the same time, a broken heart is a universal experience. Though we may feel alone in the moment, almost everyone feels the awful effects of a broken heart at some point in their life. Most of us can relate with that horrible feeling in the chest, the racing thoughts, and the tears. We can all relate with the long sleepless nights. Unfortunately, love often times leads to a broken heart.
There are a number of different ways people have expressed their feelings of heartbreak to the world. Here we have compiled a list of quotes about broken hearts for you to read, whether to share with a hurting friend or find personal solace with. The topic is a common one, and quotes abound about broken hearts and the feeling of loss associated with a broken heart.
Whether the quote is a long story about a personal experience, or short, sweet, and to the point, you are sure to find a quote or two that hits a note with what you are feeling. Perhaps inspiration can be found in these sage statements from authors all over the globe as well.
Don’t dwell on the feelings of a broken heart alone. Use this list of 101 broken heart quotes to take comfort, seek advice, and build context around what you are experiencing. Inspire others with these words as well.
Broken Heart Quotes
1. There were many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts being broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream-whatever that dream might be. – Pearl Buck
2. It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters anymore. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace. – George Bernard Shaw
3. For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack. – D.H. Lawrence
4. I’d rather have a broken arm than a broken heart. – Christie Brinkley
5. The cure for a broken heart is simple, my lady. A hot bath and a good night’s sleep. – Margaret George
6. But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will be unflyable, stuck in the climb. – Elizabeth Wein
7. Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime. – Mineko Iwasaki
8. Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option. – Mark Twain
9. Love is unconditional. Relationships are not. – Grant Gudmunson
10. The heart will break, but broken live on. – Lord Byron
11. Everyone in life is going to hurt you, you just have to figure out which people are worth the pain. – Bob Marley
12. You can’t buy love, but you can pay heavily for it. – Henny Youngman
13. The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt. – Max Lerner
14. No matter how hard your heart is broken, the world doesn’t stop for your grief. – Faraaz Kazi
15. When you have your heart broken for the first time, you gain depth. – Sienna Miller
16. If you haven’t broken any heart yet, you never loved. – M.F. Moonzajer
17. Sometimes, all you can do is lie in bed, and hope to fall asleep before you fall apart. – William C. Hannan
18. When you lose someone, you get used to living day to day without them. But you’ll never get used to the “10 second heartbreak.” That’s the time it takes to wake to full consciousness each day and remember. – Nina Guilbeau
19. 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
20. If you are heartbroken and can’t face the world, you need something with a fantastic plot. You won’t be able to read anything boring because your attention span when you are heartbroken decreases by three-quarters. – Isabel Gillies
21. God is closest to those with broken hearts. – Jewish Proverb
22. To meet, to know, to love—and then to part, Is the sad tale of many a heart. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
23. What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you. – Richard Wilbur
24. Pleasure of love lasts but a moment. Pain of love lasts a lifetime. – Bette Davis
25. You can’t buy love, but you can pay heavily for it. — Henry Youngman
26. Don’t tie your heart to a person that has nothing left to offer you. Let it go. It might hurt for a while, but when you get over it, you’ll see that it’s better. – Orebela Gibenga
27. I know that’s what people say—you’ll get over it. I’d say it, too. But I know it’s not true. Oh, you’ll be happy again, never fear. But you won’t forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him. – Betty Smith
28. He loved me. He loved me, but he doesn’t love me anymore, and it’s not the end of the world. – Jennifer Weiner
29. Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together. – Marilyn Monroe
30. Don’t throw away your time dreaming of someone that doesn’t want you. No one is that amazing, certainly not the one who would pass you up. – Donna Lynn Hope
31. Hearts live by being wounded. – Oscar Wilde
32. Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience. – Victoria Holt
33. Love is blind, but a broken heart sees everything. – Matshona Dhliwayo
34. Our bodies heal without permission, but our hearts need consent. Give it. – Lauren Eden
35. The shattering of a heart when being broken is the loudest quiet ever. – Carroll Bryant
36. To heal the broken heart, break the hate. The more you get mad, the more you get sad.
37. We draw maps of each other’s pasts. Heartbreaks colored in black. Grief outlined in purple. The happiest times shaded yellow. This is how we learn each other. We are so scared and brave. We are so terrified and willing. We rewrite the definition of brave and it is this: love again. love again. love again. – Fortesa Latifi
38. I loved you; and perhaps I love you still, the flame, perhaps, is not extinguished; yet it burns so quietly within my soul, no longer should you feel distressed by it. – Alexander Pushkin
39. You can die of a broken heart — it’s scientific fact — and my heart has been breaking since that very first day we met. I can feel it now, aching deep behind my rib cage the way it does every time we’re together, beating a desperate rhythm: Love me. Love me. Love me. – Abby McDonald
40. The heart is the only broken instrument that works. – T.E. Kalem
41. The saddest thing in the world, is loving someone who used to love you.
42. A broken heart is what makes life so wonderful five years later, when you see that special guy in an elevator and he is fat and smoking and saying “Long time no see.” – Phyllis Batelle
43. I know what it’s like to have a broken heart. I know what it’s like to feel pain: When my songs don’t become hits, it breaks my heart. There are a million ways to break a heart. I can relate. – Diane Warren
44. When you go through heartbreak, you just do the things that get you by. Eventually, you realize it’s about making the most of life. – Britney Spears
45. Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell. – Edna St. Vincent Millay
46. Sometimes a little heartbreak is a lesson, and the best thing to do is just learn the lesson. – Jon Voight
47. She broke her own heart, holding onto him. – R.H. Sin
48. 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
49. 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
50. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. ― James Baldwin
51. Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken. – Jeffery Eugenides
52. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something. ― Elizabeth Gilbert
53. It’s funny how artistic we become when our hearts are broken. – Hotel Books
54. Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. – Louise Erdrich
55. Only time can heal your broken heart. Just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs. – Jim Henson
56. I often say, ‘My last relationship failed and didn’t paralyze me. My last heartache didn’t kill me. Why would this one? I will not break. — Sujeiry Gonzalez
57. It is a dull sensation, your heart breaking, like the sound of a pebble dropping on the sand. Not a shattering, not a tearing apart, there is nothing shrill or grandiose about the sensation. It is merely an internal realization that something treasured you never knew you had is leaving forever. – Samantha Bruce-Benjamin
58. If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders. – Andrew Harvey
59. I have not broken your heart…you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. – Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
60. Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go. – Herman Hesse
60. Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fish bodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made. – Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
61. Every quote, every book, every film seemed to suggest that ‘one day’ someone would come into my life and love me with an intensity and a passion I had never experienced before. And to their credit they were right; It all came and went so fast it really did feel as if it were just ‘one day.’ – Ranata Suzuki
62. Our emotions pull us in different directions. The stronger the emotion, the greater the pull. Feelings are not always practical, nor do they make any logical sense. That’s just the way it goes. – Lang Leav
63. You can’t fly with a broken wing; you can’t love with a broken heart.
64. Love is like a puzzle. When you’re in love, all pieces fit but when your heart gets broken, it takes a while to get everything back together.
65. You’re leaving me. Then go in peace. And let Your wish alone be lamp to light your path. And find tranquillity where’er you be. – Chaim Nachman Bialik
66. How frail the human heart must be – a mirrored pool of thought. So deep and tremulous an instrument of glass that it can either sing, or weep. – Sylvia Plath
67. I don’t know why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every other part of my body is broken too. – Terri Guillemets
68. A broken heart is what makes life so wonderful five years later, when you see that special guy in an elevator and he is fat and smoking and saying ‘Long time no see’. – Phyllis Batelle
69. I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken — and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as I lived. – Margaret Mitchell
70. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. – Wallace Stegner
71. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. – Jodi Lynn Anderson
72. The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it’s been broken into a million pieces. – Robert James Waller
73. Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t. – Stephen King
74. Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt hollow and empty and aching. ― Juliet Marillier
75. This time I wouldn’t forget him, because I couldn’t ever forgive him – for breaking my heart twice. – James Patterson
76. Given enough time and distance, the heart will always heal. – Laura Fitzgerald
77. Sometimes a broken heart can mend something else’s brokenness. ― Munia Khan
78. Every heart, it have its own ache. ― Lynn Cullen
79. My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn’t that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends? ― Elizabeth Gilbert
80. Love is only made more valuable by the risk of heartbreak. ― Alessandra Torre
81. If your heart is broken, do you have a phantom heart? ― Damon Suede
82. He was acting like our kiss had broken him, and his reaction was breaking me. ― Shannon A. Thompson
83. The prettiest smiles hide the deepest secrets. The prettiest eyes have cried the most tears. And the kindest hearts have felt the most pain.
84. This is what it felt like to have a broken heart. It felt less like a cracking down the middle and more like she had swallowed it whole and it sat bruised and bleeding in the pit of her stomach. ― Wendy Wunder
85. I’ve been on the floor and I’ve been heartbroken. I didn’t know how I was going to stand up. But I just gave it time. – Sandra Bullock
86. Long time I have been on my own, but now really I’m alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart. – Patricia McCormick
87. Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren’t accompanied by regret. ― Laura Kasischke
88. Our hearts will be broken a thousand times over, but who is to say that our hearts were ever perfect to begin with? Maybe they can withstand a few cracks. After all, the way that we love is not perfect. We love things to such an incomprehensible depth that these things become worn in. Wouldn’t the most beautiful thing in the world be a heart that has been through all of the wear and tear, as worn in as your favorite sweater that both keeps you warm and grants you a smile in return? That’s the kind of heart that I want. Bruises make for beautiful colors after all. ― Elizabeth Brooks
89. Has someone made you heartbroken? Then, why are you still thinking of him? – Debra K. Messer
90. Patience is key for getting over a breakup. That, and trailing off your interaction after the breakup. — Drake
91. Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…. You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love. – Neil Gaiman
92. There are many stages of grief. It’s sad, something coming to an end. It cracks you open. When you try to avoid the pain, it creates greater pain. I’m a human being, having a human experience in front of the world. I try really hard to rise above it. – Jennifer Aniston
93. When your heart is broken, you plant seeds in the cracks and you pray for rain. — Andrea Gibson
94. Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishing. – Anais Nin
95. Never love with all your heart, it only ends in aching. – Countee Cullen
96. Dancing with heartbreak is the strangest thing. It’s like playing with fire; you know you’ll get burnt but you are still captivated by the flickering flame and the magnetic heat. ― Aishabella Sheikh
97. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
98. The broken heart. You think you will die, but you keep living, day after day after terrible day. ― Charles Dickens
99. In life we don’t always get what we want; hopes and dreams get washed away so easily, hearts are broken, chances are missed, and we always seem to end up right back where we started. ― Rebecah McManus
100. Love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure. – Herman Hesse
101. I was blind and heart broken and didn’t want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, “I have wonderful news!” And I was like, “I don’t really want to hear wonderful news right now,” and Gus said, “This is wonderful news you want to hear,” and I asked him, “Fine, what is it?” and he said, “You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!” ― John Green
Destiny says
I like the sad broken heart quotes and I like more of them in picture format, but thanks for the website anyway!