Gone But Never Forgotten—125 Beautiful Sympathy Quotes and Messages

Whether you are experiencing grief yourself or have the unpleasant fortune of watching a loved one grieve, sympathy can be difficult to express. However, if it's hard for you to find the words to convey your sympathy, there are always the beautiful words of others to fall back on when offering sympathy in a card or note. Or, if you're going through a difficult time yourself, these messages of sympathy might just resonate with you.

Here are 125 emotional sympathy quotes and messages.

125 Sympathy Quotes

1. "To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die." —Thomas Campbell

2. "As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death." —Leonardo Da Vinci

3. "The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.” —C.S. Lewis

4. "May angels lead you in." —Jimmy Eat World

5. "The more sympathy you give, the less you need.” —Malcolm Forbes

Related: What to Write in a Pet Sympathy Card

6. "It’s hard to forget someone who gave you so much to remember." —Unknown

7. "Death ends a life, not a relationship.  All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on- in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here."—Mitch Albom

Related: Quotes About Life

8. "Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell." —Joni Mitchell

9. "Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”—Emily Dickinson

10. "Pain is certain, suffering is optional." —Buddha

11. "There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart." —Mahatma Gandhi

12. "Grant but memory to us and we lose nothing by death.”—Whittier

13. "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” —Alfred Lord Tennyson

14. "The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.” —Dr. Colin Murray Parkes

15. "Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other.” —Leo Buscaglia

16. "Grief and love are conjoined—you don’t get one without the other.” —Jandy Nelson

17. "Sympathy does not think. It acts. It acts to remove the ceaseless sufferings of the world.”—Sri Chinmoy

18. "A thousand moments that I had just taken for granted, mostly because I had assumed that there would be a thousand more.” —Morgan Matson

19. "Darkness may hide the trees and the flowers from the eyes but it cannot hide love from the soul.” —Rumi

20. "The Remembrance of the good done those we have loved is the only consolation when we have lost them." —Demoustier

Related: Condolence Messages

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

22. "May you take comfort in knowing there is one more angel above us.” —Unknown

23. "There is no pain so great as the Memory of joy in present grief.” —Aeschylus

24. "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

25. "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.” —Helen Keller

26. "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

27. "As we go through the journey of life, we must remember that the impressions we leave behind will define who and what we are. They are just as individual as the paths we have chosen to walk. So leave good impressions wherever you go.” —Dave Hedges

28. "In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods of tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life.” —Nicholas Sparks

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

30. "There is no death. Only a change of worlds.” —Chief Seattle

31. "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” —A.A. Milne

32. "Those we love and lose are always connected by heartstrings into infinity.” —Terri Guillemets

33. "Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

34. "Although no words can take away the sorrow that you bare. May it be comforting to you to know that others care.” — Unknown

35. "It is not length of life, but depth of life.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

36. "There is no way that i could being to explain to someone what it feels like being without you. I would say it’s like the earth without the sky.” —Cindy Adkins

37. "You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really feel the loss.” —Mandy Hale

38. "Absence and death are the same. Only that in death there is no suffering.” —Theodore Roosevelt

39. "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” —Thornton Wilder

40. "That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not; rather find strength in what remains behind.” —William Wordsworth

41. "There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the color, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.” —Oscar Wilde

42. "I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” —Agatha Christie

43. "There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.” —Dante Alighieri

44. "Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.” —Meister Eckhart

45. "I would trade all of my tomorrows for just one more day with you.” —Unknown