The Saddest Thing Quotes & Sayings

The saddest thing in life is wasted talent and the choices you make will shape your life forever. — Chazz Palminteri

The saddest thing about death, whether it's our own or someone we care for, is when the world doesn't stop when we do. — Darnell Lamont Walker

Two people who were once very close can
without blame
or grand betrayal
become strangers.
perhaps this is the saddest thing in the world. — Warsan Shire

The saddest thing is that when I sat down to rehearse for the Pixies, I couldn't believe that I had given up something that I loved. Now I hold the drum at night and I want to go to bed with it. — Joey Santiago

The saddest thing in life is to marry a woman who looks like a cook
and isn't. — Evan Esar

The saddest thing was that I think he really did care about me. But we were too different, he said. From different worlds. — Staci Hart

And they can't understand, what hurts more - Missing the other person, or pretending not to. — Khadija Rupa

There are people out there who have x-ray vision. They can see through my walls, armor and scrims and filters right down to the real me. And the saddest thing in the world? I haven't forgotten who that person is. She's on there and waiting. Like sleeping beauty locked high in a tower, she's been patient and aware of the coma I've been in all these years. I realise the one hitch in having x-ray glasses is that I'm utterly exposed to him. It's one thing to want someone to keep looking, to swim over moats and dodge flaming arrows to find you. It's quite another when you ask yourself, really ask yourself, if you're finally ready to come out into the open. No matter what. — Liza Palmer

You see, there's some blues for folks ain't never had a thing, and that's a sad blues ... but the saddest kind of blues is for them that's had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won't come back no more. Ain't no sufferin' in this world worse than that; and that's the blue we call 'I Had It But It's All Gone Now. — Ken Grimwood

It would be something, being in another place.'
A spark of an idea caught tinder. 'Where would you most like to go?'
'I don't know. I know nothing about the world. Enfield is my world.'
It was the saddest thing Dany had ever heard. 'How about this: when I come next time, I'll bring the world to you.'
Though he didn't understand, Colton looked interested. 'Is that possible?'
'Anything is possible'. — Tara Sim

The saddest thing a girl can do is dumb herself down for a guy. — Emma Watson

Silence from God is the loudest and saddest thing I've ever heard. — Lacey Sturm

The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight. — Charles Baudelaire

Perhaps the saddest thing to admit is that those who rejected the Cross have to carry it, while those who welcomed it are so often engaged in crucifying others. — Nikolai Berdyaev

Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end. — Yiyun Li

My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world. — Sherman Alexie

Otherwise, there were no long goodbyes or emotional scenes. That isn't part of foster care. You just leave and you just die a little bit. Just a little bit because a little bit more of you understands that this is the way it's going to be. And you grow hard around the edges, just a little bit. Not in some big way, but just a little bit because you have to, because if you don't it only hurts worse the next time and a little bit more of you will die. And you don't want that because you know that if enough little bits of you die enough times, a part of you leaves. Do you know what I mean? You're still there, but a part of you leaves until you stand on the sidelines of life, simply watching, like a ghost that everyone can see and no one is bothered by. You become the saddest thing there is: a child of God who has given up. — John William Tuohy

you are snakeskin
and i keep shedding you somehow
my mind is forgetting
every exquisite detail
of your face
the letting go has
become the forgetting
which is the most
pleasant and the saddest thing
to have happened — Rupi Kaur

The saddest thing about these imagined deathbed conversions is that, even if they were real, they could hardly be seen as victories for Christ. They are stories in which the final pain of a fatal disease, or the fear of imminent death and eternal punishment, is identified as the factor necessary for otherwise rational people to believe in the supernatural.

If mental torture is required to effect a conversion, what does that say about the reliability of the fundamental premises of Christianity to begin with? Evangelicals would be better advised to concentrate on converting the living. Converting the deceased suggests only that they can't convince those who can argue back. They should let the dead rest in peace. — Lawrence M. Krauss

The saddest thing about any man is that he be ignorant, and the most exciting thing is that he knows. — Alfred The Great

The saddest thing in life is to die without living. — Debasish Mridha

I saw the horrible way that people could treat each other. That may be the saddest thing of all. I saw greed and anger and murder and a total lack of concern for human life. It was a wicked side of the human soul that I saw ... and it saddened me to know that such a dark place existed. — D.J. MacHale

The saddest thing is a retarded man who is crying and promising a broken egg that it will still be a chicken some day.
And that they'll play together in a field when it gets better. — Chris Onstad

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten. — William Faulkner

It was the truest, purest, saddest thing she had ever heard spoken. It was like hearing gospel for the first time, how it shocked you, how it made you afraid because you thought no one could see inside you. — Sarah Addison Allen

Men and boys always want to go fight. They are always looking for a reason to go to war. It is the saddest thing. They have this abiding notion that war is fun. And no history lesson will convince them differently. — Kate DiCamillo

Have you ever seen a genius out there looking for a job? it's the saddest thing in the world. no one will hire him. there is only one place where he is always welcome- at the bottom. — Henry Miller

The more one needs God the more perfect he is. To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself. It is the saddest thing in the world if a human being goes through life without discovering that he needs God! — Soren Kierkegaard

I think the biggest, saddest thing that happens in our lives is that we just don't embrace the things that could make it better because they don't seem to make it better at any given moment or we can't decide how to get across the aisle to that person. — Adam Duritz

Writing this, I'm reminded that until I was quite old I too adhered to the romantic cult of madness. I got over it, thank God. Experience has taught me that this particular form of romanticism is pure stupidity, and that madness is the saddest, most dismal thing on earth. — Emmanuel Carrere

I think of the saddest thing I can and then add a sick dog to that. If I think of a sick dog from the beginning, I just stop there. — Sufjan Stevens

The saddest thing is when the toilet from an abandoned space station falls back to earth, lands upside-down on a child who was playing alone in the backyard, and smooshes them into the shape of half a hard-boiled egg.
... And when they lift the toilet off of the child, two lips at the top of the bloody mound say, on their dying breath, I love you, mommy. — Chris Onstad

The saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact. — Dean Koontz

While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on. — Aimee Bender

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again. — Orson Scott Card

I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them. — John Le Carre

One thing was certain: Human Time was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever existed. She tried her best to ignore it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

the letting go has
become the forgetting
which is the most
pleasant and saddest thing
to have happened — Rupi Kaur

The saddest thing in life is people with sight, but without vision. — Helen Keller

That's the one thing you wake up with every day: How long have I got left? And that's the saddest thing in the world, because you have this absolute realization that everything you love you're going to have to let go of and give up. I look at my daughter and I think, There's going to be a point where I'm not going to be around for her. Even the thought of that breaks my heart. — Moby

The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies. — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

And for a second she weakens, and the way she used to look at him flashes across her face, and then it's gone, replaced by near hate. It's the saddest thing he's ever seen. It's a tragedy. — Luke Smitherd

Destroying our confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are going to be, but only a wasted reminder of what God created man to be. We want to cling to our natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get us in contact with the life of Jesus Christ - a life that can never be described in terms of natural virtues. It is the saddest thing to see people who are trying to serve God depending on that which the grace of God never gave them. They are depending solely on what they — Oswald Chambers

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury. — Charlie Chaplin

The saddest thing about old age is our idea of it. — Marty Rubin

I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of the sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once. — Tana French

Mommy set the phone aside as Liam whined and plucked at her shirt. "Are you hungry?" she asked gently. He nodded. "I can't nurse you when you're like this, sweetheart, not with all of those razor-sharp teeth."
That was the saddest thing he had ever heard in his whole life. He lifted his head and looked at her, grief stricken. — Thea Harrison

The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering. — Agatha Christie

A Betrayal I cannot undo what I have done; I can't un-sing a song that's sung. And the saddest thing about my regret - I can't forgive me, and you can't forget. — Lang Leav

Do they think that they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction? Is this then something to be said gaily? Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world? — Blaise Pascal

The saddest thing was actually getting fed up with one another. It's like growing up in a family. When you get to a certain age, you want to go off and get your own girl and your own car, split up a bit. — George Harrison

It's the most extraordinary and saddest thing, the amount of talent out there not being seen. — Gedde Watanabe

The saddest thing of word or pen, To know the things that might have been. — John Greenleaf Whittier

It would be the saddest thing to me, princess. To walk separately from you, when the ground will let us go as we always did. Beatrice — Kazuo Ishiguro

In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love
if once one has ever fallen in. — Willa Cather

( ... ) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death was Augustus Water. — John Green

She'd wanted love, a husband and children, a home filled with laughter and security, the things she'd never had as a child. She'd stopped even dreaming about them, she realized, and that was the saddest thing of all. But then she'd never really had a chance; she'd fallen in love with the one man she couldn't have, and it appeared that she was one of those women who loved on once in their lifetime — Linda Howard

A thing about poetry is, It takes cuts and pain to bleed words. The deeper the wound is, the more you bleed. And eventually, you will start falling in love with it. But the saddest part is, sometimes there comes a moment when you start to feel that all those wounds on your soul are not enough. And you start cutting yourself deeper, forgetting when to stop. — Akshay Vasu

The saddest thing one meets is a nominal Christian. — Amy Carmichael

Sometimes this fellow's music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about. — Carson McCullers

The saddest thing is that this is often all we understand about ourselves: that so often, we live our neighbor's life, instead of our own. — Robin S. Sharma

As he mused on the possibilities he became aware of the odor of cigarette smoke. And the sound of muted sobs ... As she tried to stifle her anguish, what came out of her was utterly mournful, the saddest thing Luke had ever heard. He wanted to scramble out of the tree house, climb back into his room, and shut the window. But he was afraid to move. She would hear him.
So he just sat there, hearing the agony of thousands of failed days bleed out of Nell. He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. he didn't want to hear her sobbing, didn't want to acknowledge she felt pain - nor that he knew she'd lived through more pain than anyone else he'd ever known. That maybe she had sent Norah and Kieran away because she knew Eleanor's home had to be happier than hers. He didn't want to acknowledge that. He wouldn't be able to hate her then. — Susan Meissner

The saddest thing for a girl to do is to dumb herself down for a guy. — Emma Watson

Did you ever see a one eyed woman cry? You know the saddest thing about the woman, the tears don't come out just one eye. — Gary B.B. Coleman

I called Isaac, who cursed life and the universe and God Himself and who said where are the goddamned trophies to break when you need them, and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters's death was Augustus Waters. — John Green

The saddest thing is when a guy is paying so much attention to the world and everything going by that he can't take the time for his own mother. — Evel Knievel

The saddest thing that befalls a soul is when it loses faith in God and woman. — Alexander Smith

Richard Grierson smiles, but it's an inward-pointing smile, a smile of someone folding himself back up for storage in the colorful corners of his own crayon fantasies. She looks at the books, their titles hazy with a thin film of sawdust, and she looks at the toy ships built for imaginary journeys along the red dotted lines of a child's map, and she looks at the exotic pictures in the books still open flat before her, and she understands that these places are just places of the mind, and she wants to be able to exalt his wild dreams and imaginings along with her own - but there's something about them that make them feel like the saddest thing she's ever seen. — Alden Bell

Reality's its own thing. And I'm not really into reality that much. I'm into this cinematic stylized reality that can comment on reality. It's like the most beautiful parts of reality and the saddest parts, but it's none of this middle ground. — Zack Snyder

Chocolate is the great love of my life." "That is either the saddest or smartest thing I've ever heard." "Smartest. Chocolate has never let me down and it's brought me a lot closer to the elusive-O than any man ever has. Tastes better, too. — Genna Rulon

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.
And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all. — Boris Pasternak

What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part - there was no one to blame and no way to reverse — Miranda July

The saddest thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies. — Anonymous

The saddest thing is an old bag lady, freezing to death in the snow on Christmas Eve, and the last thing she sees is a family in a nice warm diner getting beheaded by the Taliban. — Chris Onstad

There were a lot of areas we didn't cover that I'm hoping to cover if we do some specials. One is to see more of Patsy's home and her home life, which is just the saddest thing. — Jennifer Saunders

Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.
That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. — Ernest Hemingway,

The saddest part about this whole thing is that while I was in there begging you to stay, I didn't fucking realize you were already gone. — Gail McHugh

The saddest thing about our tendency to compare ourselves with one another is that it makes us compete with each other. — Renee Swope

The saddest thing is there won't be anyone to miss us when we're gone. No family, no friends, no one waiting at home."
"It's better that way," I said. "It'll be easier for me, knowing my death doesn't add to anyone's pain."
"If you can't give anyone pain, then you can't give them joy either. — Jennifer A. Nielsen

The saddest thing is a little girl who is told by her own mother and father that she will never be pretty.
And then they open the front door, and on the porch is a little white suitcase, with all of her things in it. — Chris Onstad

It is not bad that the main beneficiaries of freedom criticize open societies, where there is much that can be criticized. It is bad if they do so by taking the side of those who seek to destroy these open societies, replacing them with authoritarian regimes, as in Venezuela or Cuba. When many artists and intellectuals betray democratic ideals, they are not betraying abstract principles, but rather the thousands and millions of flesh-and-blood people who, under dictatorships, resist and fight to gain freedom. But the saddest thing is that this betrayal of the victims does not come from principles and convictions but rather from professional opportunism and posturing, gestures and actions adapted to circumstance. Many artists and intellectuals in our times have become very cheap. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

So what is the fallout for dogs of the Lassie myth? As soon as you bestow intelligence and morality, you bestow the responsibility that goes along with them. In other words, if the dog knows it's wrong to destroy furniture yet deliberately and maliciously does it, remembers the wrong he did and feels guilt, it feels like he merits a punishment2, doesn't it? That's just what dogs have been getting - a lot of punishment. We set them up for all kinds of punishment by overestimating their ability to think. Interestingly, it's the "cold" behaviorist model that ends up giving dogs a much better crack at meeting the demands we make of them. The myth gives problems to dogs they cannot solve and then punishes them for failing. And the saddest thing is that the main association most dogs have with that punishment is the presence of their owner. This puts a pretty twisted spin on loooving dogs 'cause they're so smart, doesn't it? — Jean Donaldson

Mr Freeman: "Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag." He sticks his finger down his throat. "The next time you work on your trees, don't think about trees. Think about love, or hate, or joy, or pain- whatever makes you feel something, makes your palms sweat, or your toes curl. Focus on that feeling.
When people don't express themselves, they die on piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside- walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know. — Laurie Halse Anderson

My grandmother once told my mother that there is a splice of quartz inside each of us, like the quartz inside a compass or clock. We feel the stone glow warm when we find what it is we are meant to do. My grandmother was a singer; voice was her quartz, a second heartbeat that reminded her always of who she was. My mother's quartz is dance and Joaquin's is the piano. The saddest souls in the world, my mother believes, are those who never discover this thing within them. There is a difference between those who wander in search of that glow and those who wander in hopes of evading it. It is frightening, after all - that first awakening when the radiance within threatens to topple you. Even more terrifying is the decision to allow the fire to continue smoldering, because the brighter you let it get, the more terrible the darkness should you ever let it out."

- Elizabeth Genovise "Irises" (O. Henry prize winner 2016) — Elizabeth Genovise

The thing about the human race is, It turns up against everything or everyone that it loses its faith and belief on. And the saddest thing to witness is, Most of it have lost its faith towards humanity. — Akshay Vasu

Sheffield had decided, centuries back, that the saddest thing about ephemerals was that their little lives rarely held time enough for love.) "Oh, — Robert A. Heinlein

My father always said, 'The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.' — Chazz Palminteri

The saddest thing about falling in love is that sooner or later something will go wrong. — Unknown

One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours - all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy. — William Faulkner

No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man. — Gregory David Roberts

Think of that person you knew when you were a kid, who you always thought you could have loved completely and forever.Well, you could have. It's the truth, and it's the saddest and simplest thing. There isn't just one person for each of us in the world. There aren't many, but there are always a few people we could have made it with, that maybe we still want to make it with, that press themselves so close to our hearts they leave scars, and then slip through our fingers and disappear from our lives. And it doesn't make a difference if you're thirteen or ninety- eight because some things you feel are real, no matter when. — Abigail Tarttelin

I've often thought that among all the afflicting sights of the world, none can be much more so than this one short walk along three city blocks, where night after night it's possible to see--indeed, it's impossible not to see--these faces from which hope and joy and dignity and light have been draining so steadily and for so long that now there is nothing left but this assortment of indifferent, damaged masks. They belong to human beings who, after a lifetime of struggling to become one thing or another, have succeeded only in becoming the rough sketches of their species, recognizable but empty, the bruised and wretched bodies and souls of the saddest people on earth: the people who no longer care. — Edwin O'Connor

We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk - always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part - there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it. — Miranda July

Talented people are written off once they hit their 50s and 60s, and the saddest thing is, we just get better as we get older. — Kim Cattrall

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death; yet there are always new countries to see, new books to read (and, I hope, to write), a thousand little daily wonders to marvel at and rejoice in. — Edith Wharton

The worse thing I have done in my life is Diary writing ... a wastage of time, wastage of papers filled with some imaginary feelings and bunch of silly activities done each day ... I cant feel any glimpse of appreciable work done by me, as whatever right I did, my Diary says " you were suppose to do it, so it was not a big deal ... huhhh ... "
I passed my last few nights in reading most of its pages ... "I laughed on the lines telling about my saddest moments and nights when I cried ... .. but I felt woeful and downhearted on the lines telling about the moments when I shared my smile with someone, when I enjoyed the moments with my friends and near and dear ones, who r far and far now, and we can't get those moments back in this busy selfish life"
So now its better in busy life to live evry day and forget it in night ... enjoy life ... save papers ... no diary writing from today ... Sorry Diary, You will Miss Me ... — Saket Assertive

An animal in pain is the saddest thing on Earth. — Sanober Khan

The saddest thing I have ever experienced is watching a fellow nerd I've known forever and befriended, trying to unnerdify themselves. It was painful because that great geeky personality I loved so much is hidden behind a plaster of trends, and he may end up with a girl who will never understand him. — Melanie Kay Taylor

Who in the world has not yearned for a loved one, has never said, If only he or she could come back just once, just one more time ... ? Despite the fact that it can never happen, never ever. Surely this is the saddest thing about our mortal world, and its sadness will go on shrouding human life like a blanket of fog until its final extinction. — Ismail Kadare

The saddest thing about ephemerals was that their little lives rarely held time enough for love. — Robert A. Heinlein