Losing Friends Sayings and Quotes

Losing friends is a painful experience. Whether it’s from simply growing apart, betrayal or an unexpected death, the event can be a devastating blow to our emotional wellbeing. Below you’ll find a collection of wise and insightful quotes on losing friends.

No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow. Alice Walker
But on a day of burial there is no perspective—for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was—to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Your lost friends are not dead but gone before; advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod. Aristophanes
The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost. Arthur Schopenhauer
True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost. Charles Caleb Colton
A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words. Donna Roberts
The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart. Elizabeth Foley
Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them. Francesco Guicciardini
That friendship will not continue to the end which is begun for an end. Francis Quareles
Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret. Francois de la Rochefoucauld
The death of a friend is equivalent to the loss of a limb. German Proverb
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. Gilbert K. Chesterton
When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. Henri Nouwen
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world. Henry David Thoreau
True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance. Henry David Thoreau
The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend, as to find a friend worth dying for. Homer
It's hard to be done a favour by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough. Joe Abercrombie
It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. John Steinbeck
We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence. Joseph Roux
Lovers have a right to betray you friends don’t. Judy Holliday
And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. Khalil Gibran
You don't know who is important to you until you actually lose them. Mahatma Gandhi
You don't lose friends, because real friends can never be lost. You lose people masquerading as friends, and you're better for it. Mandy Hale
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. Martin Luther King
Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over. Octavia Butler
If friends disappoint you over and over, that's in large part your own fault. Once someone has shown a tendency to be self-centered, you need to recognize that and take care of yourself; people aren't going to change simply because you want them to. Oprah Winfrey
Hearts Live By Being Wounded. Oscar Wilde
A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Proverbs 18:24
To lose a friend is the greatest of all losses. Publilius Syrus
Can miles truly separate you from friends… If you want to be with someone you love, aren’t you already there? Richard Bach