These unrequited love quotes will inspire you. Unrequited, not requited, or not reciprocated or returned in kind unrequited love or (of a feeling, especially love) not returned or rewarded.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging unrequited love quotes quotes, unrequited love quotes sayings, and unrequited love quotes proverbs.
Best Unrequited Love Quotes
- “But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.” ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- “You know it’s love when all you want is that person to be happy, even if you’re not part of their happiness.” ~ Julia Roberts
- “If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “You lose yourself trying to hold on to someone who doesn’t care about losing you” ~ Tablo
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“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.” ~ Federico Garcia Lorca
- “The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
- “Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.” ~ J. K. Rowling
- “You can close your eyes to the things you don’t want to see, but you can’t close your heart to the things you don’t want to feel.” ~ Johnny Depp
- “In real life, love has to be possible. Even if it is not returned right away, love can only survive when the hope exists that you will be able to win over the person you desire.” ~ Paulo Coelho , Unrequited love quotes life
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“I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.” ~ St. Jerome
- “When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.” ~ Sylvia Plath
- “If we must part for ever,
Give me but one kind word to think upon,
And please myself withal, whilst my heart’s breaking!” ~ Thomas Otway - “The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham
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“All love is unrequited. All of it.” ~ J. Michael Straczynski
- “Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?” ~ James Patterson
- “Look after my heart – I’ve left it with you.” ~ Stephenie Meyer
- “Stop giving energy to the things you don’t want.” ~ Wayne Dyer
- “I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.” ~ Wilbur Smith
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“People do incredible things for love, particularly for unrequited love.” ~ Daniel Radcliffe
- “Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.” ~ Merle Shain
- “Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face – I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.” ~ Nicholas Sparks
- “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
- “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.” ~ Neil Gaiman
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“Perhaps a great love is never returned.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “I heard what you said. I’m not the silly romantic you think. I don’t want the heavens or the shooting stars. I don’t want gemstones or gold. I have those things already. I want…a steady hand. A kind soul. I want to fall asleep, and wake, knowing my heart is safe. I want to love, and be loved.” ~ Shana Abe
- “We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.” ~ Sam Keen
- “Life has now taught me that love for things, like all unrequited love, takes its toll in the long run.” ~ Adolfo Bioy Casares
- “In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.” ~ Mignon McLaughlin
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“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.” ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
- “Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
- “If you don’t receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.” ~ Robert Goolrick
- “So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.” ~ John Green
- “I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.” ~ Barbara Pym , Unrequited love quotes for him
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“I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.” ~ Francesca Lia Block
- “The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.” ~ Joyce Carol Oates
- “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.” ~ Charles M. Schulz
- “Love, unrequited, robs me of my rest:
Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers:
Love, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest,
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!” ~ W. S. Gilbert - “If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not; then marriages would be truly made in heaven.” ~ Ben Elton
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“She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.” ~ Julia Quinn
- “To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.” ~ Alphonse de Lamartine
- “I have to admit, an unrequited love is so much better than a real one. I mean, it’s perfect… As long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending. It has endless potential.” ~ Sarah Dessen
- “Snape’s patronus was a doe,’ said Harry, ‘the same as my mother’s because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from when they were children.” ~ J. K. Rowling
- “Love Jo all your days, if you choose, but don’t let it spoil you, for it’s wicked to throw away so many good gifts because you can’t have the one you want.” ~ Louisa May Alcott
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“Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.” ~ Cassandra Clare
- “It’s delicious to have people adore you, but it’s exhausting, too. Particularly when your own feelings don’t match theirs.” ~ Tasha Alexander
- “There were certain things that I watched, and I screened a series of period films as well, not because I wanted to copy those, because I wanted to be different. “Far from the Madding Crowd” was one I looked to because I thought it looked so good. “Doctor Zhivago.” Unrequited love is always a great thing. “Tess” was something I looked at, I thought Polanski got the period right.” ~ Neil LaBute
- “The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,
The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,
And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep.” ~ Walt Whitman - “I do not now begin, – I still adore Her whom I early cherish’d in my breast; Then once again with prudence dispossess’d, And to whose heart I’m driven back once more. The love of Petrarch, that all-glorious love, Was unrequited, and, alas, full sad.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Unrequited love quotes for her
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“Unrequited love’s a bore.” ~ Lorenz Hart
- “Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “He could remember all about it now; the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.” ~ Elizabeth Gaskell
- “True values entail suffering. That’s the way we think. All in all, we tend to view melancholia as more true. We prefer music and art to contain a touch of melancholia. So melancholia in itself is a value. Unhappy and unrequited love is more romantic than happy love. For we don’t think that’s completely real, do we?…Longing is true. It may be that there’s no truth at all to long for, but the longing itself is true. Just like pain is true. We feel it inside. It’s part of our reality.” ~ Lars von Trier
- “Most people have a harder time letting themselves love than finding someone to love them.” ~ Bill Russell
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“Unrequited love made right is the ultimate, isn’t it?” ~ Bella Andre
- “I had to get over [him]. For months now, a stone had been sitting on my heart. I’d shed a lot of tears over [him], lost a lot of sleep, eaten a lot of cake batter. Somehow, I had to move on. [Life] would be hell if I didn’t shake loose from the grip he had on my heart. I most definitely didn’t want to keep feeling this way, alone in a love affair meant for two. Even if he’d felt like The One. Even if I’d always thought we’d end up together. Even if he still had a choke chain on my heart.” ~ Kristan Higgins
- “Unrequited love is like hitting your head against a wall that isn’t there.” ~ Shannon Wheeler
- “Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.” ~ Alain de Botton
- “Unrequited love is not an affront to man but raises him.” ~ Alexander Pushkin
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“Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free; love me no more, but love my love of thee.” ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne
- “Powerful women always interpret hostility as unrequited love.” ~ Tina Brown
- “One thing I’ve always struggled with in life is loving people too much. It’s painful when that love is not reciprocated. But one thing I always comfort myself with is the fact that Allah will always show greater love to those who love Him. Allah doesn’t disappoint you so keep your heart attached to Him.” ~ Omar Suleiman
- “She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.” ~ T. H. White
- “November Rain is a song about not wanting to be in a state of having to deal with unrequited love.” ~ Axl Rose
- “When unrequited love is the most expensive thing on the menu, sometimes you settle for the daily special.” ~ Miranda Kenneally
