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We all want to be loved. Perhaps that’s why one-sided love hurts. The pain and emotional distress of your shattered dreams and rejection might feel unbearable, but you need to move on to heal and grow. Understanding the complexities of unrequited love can help you navigate your emotions more effectively. It’s essential to acknowledge your feelings and recognize that they are valid. This article is not only a collection of quotes but also a companion for those who are experiencing the pain of one-sided love. If you struggle to cope with unattainable love, remember that sulking and isolating yourself is not the answer. Enjoying all the positives in life and finding new meaning through them is how you go beyond miseries and understand that your life is better without them.
Loving someone who doesn’t love you isn’t a crime; neither was it anyone’s fault. You might be heartbroken, but remember that it’s simply an equation that didn’t fit your plan and reflected the incompatibility of two different souls. So, don’t indulge in self-pity or lose your dignity. Instead, try to put a smile on your face and embark on a new journey toward this need for closure and finding love again.
Scroll down and read these inspirational quotes to evolve into a mature person who knows how to put a brave face on even though you’re in the lowest phases of life, filled with anguish, and come out stronger when left all alone.
150+ “Loving Someone Who Doesn’t Love You Back” Quotes
These “loving someone who doesn’t love you back” quotes are deep and meaningful. They express your feelings in a few words and make you understand you are not alone.
- “If you can love someone without the hope of ever being loved back, that love is real.”
- “Loving you is like looking at the sun on a cloudy day. You are present, but I cannot reach you. You may light up my world, but your warmth will never reach me.”
- ‘’Loving you is like falling a catching star. It’s impossible.’’
- “What is a greater punishment than burning in desire and keeping your hurt to yourself?”
- “The pain of unrequited love is like a wound that never heals.” – Paulo Coelho
- “True love, when unrequited, hurts more than anything else.”
- “Unrequited love never goes away. It only remains, waiting, and assumes a different identity for the next person to experience.”
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- ‘’Nothing sounds like a bittersweet melody as an unrequited love.’’
- “Any person who is in love is happy, even if the love is not returned.”
- “Unrequited love is the best sort of love as it is perfect and will never end.”
- “You have to decide at some point whether you want to turn the page, write a new story, or close the book altogether.”
- “You just know something is amiss when you look at someone and long for something that is not yours or you cannot have. It’s an absence–a loss of a heartbeat.” –Nadège Richards
- “Until you have experienced the inflicting pain of falling in love with someone who doesn’t love you, you have not come across true hurt and despair.”
- “You are the best worst thing to ever happen to me.” ― A.H. Lueders
- “There is so much pain in loving a person too much and then letting them go. You always keep thinking about whether you should have fought for your love.”
- ‘’One-sided love is like walking on an unknown path, filled with nothing but your own shadow.’’
- “Falling in love with a person who doesn’t know anything or your feelings is sometimes a lovely feeling. You know it is not going to work, but it doesn’t hurt to hope.”
- “If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they’re yours; if they don’t they never were.” – Richard Bach
- ‘’Loving you feels like chasing a dream that will never become reality.’’
- “Loving you has taught me that, sometimes, the bravest act of all is to let go and find the love that’s meant for me.”
- “Loving someone who doesn’t love you back is a prickly feeling – rather like hugging a cactus. The tighter you hold, the more it hurts.”
- ‘’Letting go of the one you love is the hardest thing in the world.’’
- “As long as the person deserves it, it doesn’t matter if you love them. They must be worthy of your love.”
- ‘’Love unanswered reflects the intricacies of one’s heart.’’
- ‘’Not getting the love you pour back is like being trapped in your own heart.’’
- “When a person’s attention is all you want in the whole world, it hurts when they don’t even notice you.”
- ‘’One of the greatest punishments is to burn with longing and keep quiet.’’
- “Experiencing an unrequited love is like being drawn to the bottomless pit of despair.”
- “If thinking of a person hurts even after the years, it means you still care for them.”
- “The real horror of my life is not that I’ve killed some terrible people. The real horror is that the people I’ve loved didn’t love me back.” ― Caroline Kepnes, Hidden Bodies
- “You might never know what you did to me.”
- “Unrequited love is tricky. It hurts to hold on, but it hurts more to let go.”
- “When you love an undeserving person, you get hurt and may feel more disappointment than you deserve.”
- “Unrequited love differs from mutual love, just like delusion differs from the truth.” – George Sand
- ‘’Unrequited love never expires, but always lies in a secret place, wounded.’’
- ‘’How pure is unrequited love. It asks for nothing but to exist.’’
- “You have to increase your self-worth than being desperate and being hurt by someone who doesn’t acknowledge your feelings.”
- ‘’Not today, not tomorrow. But one day, you will see what you did to me.’’
- “You cannot get hurt if you do not care, but not caring might be the hardest thing to do.”
- ‘’The heartache of love unreturned moulds the soul’s poetry.’’
- ‘’Don’t lose hope yet. Unreturned love will soon become your catalyst for personal evolution.’’
- “I know I want to be with them, but I do not know what they think of me.”
- “My heart no longer felt as if it belonged to me. It now felt as if it had been stolen, torn from my chest by someone who wanted no part of it.” Meredith Taylor, Churning Waters
- “You feel devastated and disheartened when someone you think is important gives you no importance.”
- ‘’You will never hear the echo of my love reverberating in the chambers of your heart.’’
- “How could you have never noticed as I assumed our souls are connected?”
- “The goodbyenever hurts. The memories do.”
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- “You can only be hurt if you allow yourself to get hurt.”
- ‘’My love for you is a portrait that hangs in obscurity.’’
- “If you are in pain and suffering, it means that you have forsaken your love.”
- “The saddest thing in the world is falling out of love with a person you have fallen in love with.”
- ”Oh how much I wish I could show you the right way of things. Somehow I cannot even start wondering.”
- “If I could have had him, I could have let him go. But without the having there was nothing— so to the nothing I hold.” ― Coco J. Ginger
- ‘’Even love that isn’t given back has its rainbow. Let’s not call it unhappy.’
- ‘’Nothing’s over. Keep walking and you will find someone who love you forever.’’
- “Every word I hear, every sight I see, reminds me of the time I spent with you.”
- “The languishing feeling of loving someone who doesn’t love you is something you simply get used to but never get over.”
- “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck. –Dalai Lama
- ‘’My love for you is unattainable. Yet it’s the source of the deepest wonder for me.’’
- “When you break your heart for someone else, you end up breaking their heart too.”
- “Some of us will never know we’d owned someone’s heart for a season.” ― Joyce Rachelle
- ‘’Finding you was difficult. But now that I know you, it’s hard to keep you at all.’’
- “Why do people say we do not love with our hearts when we face so much heartache and end up with a broken heart when someone doesn’t love us back?”
- ”The simplest way to not get hurt is to not care. But isn’t that the hardest thing to do?”
- “Do not waste your years on unrequitable love, loving someone who does not love you back.”
- ‘’It still hurts because I still care.’’
- ‘’It feels like I am hugging a cactus. The tighter my hold is upon you, the more it hurts.’’
- “There is nothing more heart-wrenching than falling in lovewith someone who doesn’t return it.
- “When you love someone with all your heart, it is natural to believe that it will be returned. But when it isn’t, it hurts a lot more.”
- “It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn’t love you back. No one could do it forever” ― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth
- “But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, ‘She’s nothing to you’, the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.” ― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
- ‘’You never get over losing somebody you love. You simply get used to it.’’
- “Unrequited love hurts a lot – as someone has just torn your heart pathetically out of your chest and squeezed it dry.”
- ‘’In another life, perhaps you will call me yours.’’
- “One-sided love is like when you want something very much, but you constantly have to convince yourself that you don’t.”
- “Let no one who loves is called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.” – J.M. Barrie
- “If your love makes you vulnerable, it makes you beautiful.”
- “The heart is the most stubborn and stupidest of all. It holds on to things it knows it mustn’t and gets hurt. It is almost pointless.”
- ‘’Our love is like a fire that keeps burning without heat.’’
- “When the person of your one-sided love is far from you, it hurts. But it hurts more if you have to meet the person every day and behave as if everything is normal.”
- ‘’Nothing tests the depth and resilience of a heart than unrequited love.’’
- “Why cannot you see me for what I am?”
- “Words cannot express your feelingsin any way. Your heart is with another, and so you must just go on.”
- ‘’You fill me with a constellation of feelings. But even though I think I shine bright, you never catch my light.’’
- “The more you try to remove their thoughts from your head, the more you end up thinking about them.”
- “To want and not to have, sent all up to her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! –Virginia Woolf
- “Loving someone from a distance is so painful. You can look at them occasionally and hear them mentioned casually without anyone noticing how much pain it causes you.”
- ‘’No matter how much I try, he can never see the flowers in my eyes or hear the songs my heart sings for him.’’
- “If you are an option for someone, never make the mistake of falling in love with them.”
- My heart has always chosen you, despite the knowledge that odds are stacked up against us.’’
- “Loving someone who doesn’t love you back is like waiting for a train at a bus stop. It is hopeless, disappointing, and may fill you with sorrow in the end.”
- “When there are 7 billion people in the world, why do you let the opinions of one ruin your life?”
- “Because, if you could love someone, and keep loving them, without being loved back . . . then that love had to be real. It hurt too much to be anything else.” – Sarah Cross
- “I died a lot to live a little with you.” – Yaghma Golroei
- “When you see the person you love loving someone else, it is like a physical blow to your heart.”
- ‘’The heart always wants what it wants, even when it isn’t what it needs.’’
- ‘’Unreturned affection molds the contours of empathy.’’
- “It is easier to let someone go if you have had them in the first place. How do you let go of someone who was never yours?”
- “You are the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s okay if you don’t love me back.”
- “He was my sweetest fantasy and my bitter reality.” – Luffina Lourduraj
- ‘’It’s like I am chasing shadows, captivated by you, yet never being able to call you mine.’’
- “It is hard to love someone constantly if they do not love you back.”
- “Am I forgotten, or do I exist for you at all? If I do, would you
- “I know you are not obliged to love me back, but I would have been so happy if you had done so.”
- ‘’Living with the misassumption that someone whom you love, loves you back is painfully beautiful.’’
- “What more is unmet love than your deepest expectations wanting fulfillment?”
- “Sometimes, someone not loving you back can be the luckiest thing that can happen to you.”
- ‘’Unrequited love is destructive, yet addictive.’’
- “If someone does not love you, you can love them with enough love for the both of you.”
- ‘’Love’s a risk. But it’s worth taking to not feel that your life is empty and meaningless.’’
- “If only I could tell you how much I love you.”
- ‘’Always remember. No matter what happens, you will be loved.’’
Image: Image: Shutterstock
- “ If you love someone, set them free. If they come back, they are yours. If they don’t, they never were.”
- “I swallowed my heartbreak like a bitter pill.” – Sakshi Narula
- “Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.” – Cesare Pavese
- ‘’Giving distance is the best remedy for unrequited love.’’
- “Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.” – Alice Hoffman
- “I will always love you and miss you, but that doesn’t mean I want you back in my life.”
- ‘’Loving you brightened the corners of my soul, even though it gave shadows on my path.’’
Image: Image: Shutterstock
- “Love is like magic – just an illusion.”
- ‘’Loving you made me realise that sometimes the very best feelings are those that stay unrequited.’’
- “You will never know you were mine since last summer.”
- “If you are an empath, you must have faced the grief of unreturned love at least once in your life.”
- ‘’Finding yourself to be an option for someone who is a priority to you is painful.’’
- “Do not put your life on hold for another person, no matter how much you love them.”
- “Love is as simple as the absence of self-given to another. God, when invited, fills the void of any unrequited love; hence loving is how one is drawn closer to God no matter its most horrific repercussions.” – Criss Jami
- ”Perhaps a great love is never returned.” – Dag Hammarskjold
- “You cannot even guarantee that your child will love you as much as you do them. Your love might remain unrequited and will leave you with scattered feelings after all.”
- Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines. –Jodi Picoult
- “Unrequited love shatters you in a million pieces, each of them carrying a painful symphony.’’
- “She’d been in love with the man, and love is a scary thing. If not reciprocated, it can turn a person into a monster.” – Michele Young-Stone
- “It certainly hurts when you’re being ignored by someone who means the world to you.’’
- “I love, and that is all that matters to me.”
- ‘’The saddest symphony of all is the symphony of unrequited love.’
- “If the person you love is your soulmate, no one can stop your relationship.”
- “The truth hurts. They do not love me. These words are more hurtful to me than anything else has.”
- “When you give someone your whole heart, and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.” – Sylvia Plath
- “I have decided to remember my unrequited love as an unturned page forever.”
- “You can hate someone because they hate you and made you feel unloved, but you can never love someone because they love you.”
- ‘’You’re like a chapter I keep re-reading, knowing well that it wouldn’t affect its ending.’’
- “There is something oddly magical about unrequited love.”
- ‘’My chest is filled with feelings I have no control over.’’
- “You can lose only so much time loving someone who is never going to love you back.”
- ‘’I never got my love back from you. This led me to rediscover my strength.’’
- “You cannot go back in time to make a new beginning, but you can always go forward and create a new ending.”
- ‘’It’s tough. No matter how much I yearn to beat this feeling down, my heart never stops feeling this way.’’
- “I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay
- ‘’Don’t lose hope if they don’t love you back. Raise your chin up and keep living.’’
- “The greatest pain there is—is to love in vain.”
Image: Image: Shutterstock
- “You can choose not to see the things you don’t want to see, but you can never choose what your heart wants to feel. Love not returned will always leave an emptiness inside.”
- ‘’Loving endlessly without getting an ounce of it leaves a heart empty.’’
- “The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.” – Thornton Wilder
- “If the world was ending in five minutes, I’d call you to tell you how much I love you. But your phone would be busy because you would be talking to someone else.’’
- “There is no tragedy as unrequited love.”
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What do you do when someone you love doesn’t love you back?
When someone doesn’t love you back, try to accept the truth. Also, you may avoid them and keep yourself distracted. Pursuing new hobbies might help. Do not blame yourself for what happened. If you were at fault, try to make amendments so that you will be prepared the next time you are in love with someone else. Learning how to stop loving someone can be a crucial step in moving forward and finding happiness. To help you through this process, consider seeking support from friends, family, or a counselor.
2. Can you fall in love with someone who doesn’t love you back?
You cannot control what another person feels and may not also be in charge of circumstances. Therefore, it is possible to fall in love with someone who doesn’t love you back.
3. What is it called when you love someone, but they don’t love you back?
Unrequited love is when you have feelings for someone who doesn’t feel the same way, creating an unequal, one-sided experience.
4. How can I heal from unrequited love?
Healing from unrequited love begins with acceptance and moves towards self-reflection. It is crucial to engage in self-care, surround yourself with supportive friends, and seek professional help if needed. Talking about what you expect in a partner offers perspective on what you need and will facilitate in forming better relationships in future. Keeping busy with creative pursuits, journaling your feelings, and exploring somewhere new can also facilitate the healing process.
Loving someone who doesn’t love you back or unrequited love quotes are the best way to express your one-sided love. It can be difficult, and you may have limited opportunity to express your feelings to the person you love directly or through wordy messages. Sharing a meaningful quote may let them know your love. You may choose quotes that match your connection with the person you love. Further, never hesitate to have a conversation and tell your feelings for them as this may avoid later regrets. Always prioritize yourself and find a person who loves and cares for you instead of obsessing over your unrequited love.
Infographic: “Loving Someone Who Doesn’t Love You Back” Quotes
Love is a two-way road. But, when you are the one walking alone on it, it can be a heartbreaking experience. In addition to the quotes we have already provided in the article, we share the following infographic with additional quotes to help better relate to your feelings. Illustration: Momjunction Design Team
Key Pointers
- Loving someone who doesn’t love you back is difficult, but it’s important to remember that it’s not a failure.
- Accepting unrequited love is crucial for moving on and helps you heal and grow.
- Quotes about unrequited love can help you express feelings that are hard to describe.
- Instead of isolating yourself, connect with friends and engage in activities that bring you joy.
- Always seek relationships with mutual love and care rather than focusing on unreturned feelings.
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