45 Uplifting Comfort Grief Quotes

Grief is an experience almost everyone goes through at some point in life. In some cases, grief can be so intense that a person develops prolonged grief disorder, which affects approximately 7% to 10% of adults who have lost a loved one.

Regardless of whether a person experiences prolonged grief disorder, which tends to impact their ability to function in daily life for more than a year after their loss, the challenges of grief are real. During this difficult period, it can sometimes help to read about the ways in which other people have processed the loss of a friend or family member. 

Below are 45 uplifting comfort grief quotes to consider during the bereavement process. For additional support, consider reaching out to a licensed therapist.

1. “What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.” — Helen Keller
2. “Grieving is a necessary passage and a difficult transition to finally letting go of sorrow – it is not a permanent rest stop.” – Dodinsky
3. “I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.” -- Rita Mae Brown
4. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touches some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
5. “I will not say: Do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
6. “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
7. “If there ever comes a day where we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.” — A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
8. “To weep is to make less the depth of grief.” — William Shakespeare
9. “I’ll be seeing you
   In all the old familiar places
   That this heart of mine embraces
   All day through.”
   — Billie Holiday, “I’ll Be Seeing You”
10.  “A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.” — Maya Angelou
11. “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” — Khalil Gibran
12. “Accepting death doesn’t mean you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, ‘Why do people die?’ and ‘Why is this happening to me?’ Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.” — Caitlin Doughty
13. “There are three needs of the griever: To find the words for the loss, to say the words aloud and to know that the words have been heard.” -- Victoria Alexander
14. “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
15. “There is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.” — Alice Walker
16. “Look closely and you will see almost everyone carrying bags of cement on their shoulders. That’s why it takes courage to get out of bed in the morning and climb into the day.” — Edward Hirsch
17. “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” — Henri Mattise
18. “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
19. “The melody that the loved one played upon the piano of your life will never be played quite that way again, but we must not close the keyboard and allow the instrument to gather dust. We must seek out other artists of the spirit, new friends who gradually will help us to find the road to life again, who will walk the road with us.” — Joshua Loth Liebman
20. “We do not have to rely on memories to recapture the spirit of those we have loved and lost – they live within our souls in some perfect sanctuary which even death cannot destroy.” — Nan Witcomb
21. “The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.” — Irving Berlin
22. “Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it.” ― Stephen Levine
    

23. “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
24. “The memories we have for those who left are our ultimate consolation.” ― Anoir Ou-Chad
25. “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
26. “Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds its way back to you.” — Ranata Suzuki
27. “Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.” — Alphonse de Lamartine, Méditations Poétiques
28. “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
29. “The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?” ― Philip K. Dick
30. “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 
31. “Grief is the price we pay for love.” — Queen Elizabeth, adapted from a passage by Dr. Colin Murray Parkes
32. “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 
33. “When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.” ― Rosamund Lupton
34. “The greatest tribute we can give to the deceased is to keep on living. For when we don’t, we too shall die, before our time.” ― Charles F. Glassman
35. “Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.” — Sarah Dessen
36. “May there be comfort in knowing that someone so special will never be forgotten.” —Julie Hébert
37. “I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.” — Anne Frank
38.  “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
    “At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.” ― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
39. “And once the storm is over you won’t remember you how made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm’s all about.” — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
40. “But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.” — Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
41. “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” — Washington Irving
42. “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
43. “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
44. “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
45. “I know for certain that we never lose the people we love, even to death. They continue to participate in every act, thought and decision we make. Their love leaves an indelible imprint in our memories.” — Leo Buscaglia

Getting support for grief

While the above quotes may provide some comfort during times of grief, they’re not meant to be a substitute for professional support. If you’ve experienced the loss of a loved one, you may benefit from speaking with a licensed therapist. If it’s difficult to leave home for therapy during this challenging time, you might consider online therapy. 

Online therapy allows you to connect with a therapist via audio, video, or live chat. You can also contact your therapist at any time via in-app messaging, and they’ll usually respond as soon as they can. This may be useful if you have questions or concerns in between therapy sessions. 

Numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of online therapy. One meta-analysis published in 2021 found that online therapeutic interventions could effectively treat symptoms of grief and bereavement in adults.