Friendship can be an important part of our emotional wellbeing, and our life in general. When we are surrounded by our friends — especially close friends — we feel a sense of belonging and fulfilment; good times become great times, and tough times no longer seem insurmountable.
Losing friends is never easy and, depending on the reason, it may take us time to accept it. We can lose friends because of death, or because our paths no longer align; because of arguments, or even because we’ve discovered they were fake friends.
Here is a collection of 111 quotes about losing friends that will comfort you and help you understand that losing friends is a part of life, and if we embrace that, it will be easier to deal with our feelings. If there’s a quote you absolutely love, please let me know with a comment at the end of this post.
Beautiful losing friends quotes
So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.
— Helen Keller
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
— Henry David Thoreau
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
— Martin Luther King
It takes a minute to find a special person; an hour to appreciate them; and a day to love them. But it takes an entire lifetime to forget them.
— Unknown
Make as many friends as you can, but don’t build your life on them alone. It’s an unstable foundation.
— Sean Covey
Friendship is like a glass ornament: once it is broken, it can rarely be put back together in exactly the same way.
— Charles Kingsley
Sometimes the measure of friendship isn’t your ability to not harm, but your capacity to forgive the things done to you and ask forgiveness for your own mistakes.
— Randal Keith Milholland
Friends are like stars: they come and go, but only the true ones glow.
— Unknown
People come, people go — they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book.
— Nicholas Sparks
The most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.
— Jonathan Harnisch
Be grateful for every second of every day that you get to spend with the people you love.
— Mandy Hale
There are moments in life when you miss someone so much that you just want to pick them from your dreams and hug them for real.
— Charlie Brown
Not everyone is going to stay forever, and we still have to keep on going and thank them for what they’ve given us.
— Emery Allen
It’s time to say goodbye, but I think goodbyes are sad and I’d much rather say hello — hello to a new adventure.
— Ernie Harwell
You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and 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.
— Anne Lamott
People come and go; situations rise and fall; it’s all preparation for better things.
— Iyanla Vanzant
If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.
— Paulo Coelho
Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.
— Alphonse de Lamartine
Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.
— John Dos Passos
Those we love and lose are always connected by heartstrings into infinity.
— Terri Guillemets
The path to freedom is illuminated by the bridges you have burned, adorned by the ties you have cut, and cleared by the drama you have left behind.
— Steve Maraboli
There are some who bring a light so great to the world that even after they have gone the light remains.
— Hoda Kotb
Friends are forever. You might lose them, but you’ll never forget them.
— Unknown
Drifting from people. It happens so often. It happens without even knowing, it’s just life. There are friends that stay, yet many that go. Maybe it’s just bound to happen. It’s probably a sign that you don’t need those people in your life as much as you think you do.
— Unknown
Just because we don’t talk anymore, it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about you. It doesn’t mean that I no longer care.
— Unknown
Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It’s just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend — or a meaningful day.
— Dalai Lama
It is the now that matters. Forget about the ending and just look forward to the new beginning.
— Unknown
Don’t be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetime, is certain for those who are friends.
— Richard Bach
We can’t feel the loss of a friend until they are apart from us.
— Debolina Dutta
Work hard and go your own path. You’ll make enemies, and lose friends, but you’ll make even better ones on the way.
— Ksenia Sobchak
The reason people come and go in life is because life is a journey and we are all traveling to different destinations based on our individual life choices, and when paths cross, people who are not meant to be with you on the remaining journey drop off like passengers.
— Unknown
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.
— François de La Rochefoucauld
Yes, you can lose somebody overnight. Yes, your whole life can be turned upside down. Life is short. It can come and go like a feather in the wind.
— Shania Twain
When a close friend unexpectedly leaves us, a piece of our heart is forever broken.
— Chris Lumpkin
The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected.
— Nicholas Sparks
Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. For those who love with heart and soul, there is no such thing as separation.
— Rumi
We all lose friends. We lose them in death, to distance, and over time. But even though they may be lost, hope is not. The key is to keep them in your heart, and when the time is right, you can pick up the friendship right where you left off. Even the lost find their way home when you leave the light on.
— Amy Marie Walz
You know someone is very special to you when days just don’t seem right without them.
— John Cena
Friendship must never be buried under the weight of misunderstanding.
— Sri Chinmoy
It’s the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages: “goodbye”.
— Kurt Vonnegut
Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
True friends are the ones who never leave your heart, even if they leave your life for a while. Even after years apart, you pick up with them right where you left off, and even if they die, they’re never dead in your heart.
— Unknown
I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.
— Anne Frank
Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.
— Washington Irving
The two hardest things to say in life are hello for the first time and goodbye for the last.
— Moira Rogers
Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same.
— Flavia Weedn
It makes no sense to try to extend a friendship that was only meant to be a season into a lifetime.
— Mandy Hale
When people walk away from you, let them go. Your destiny is never tied to anyone who leaves you, and it doesn’t mean they are bad people. It just means that their part in your story is over.
— T. D. Jakes
Friendship means understanding — not agreement. It means forgiveness — not forgetting. It means that memories last, even if contact is lost.
— Unknown
The comfort of having a friend may be taken away, but not that of having had one.
— Seneca
When your friends are gone and you only can look at pictures, remember: times and people change, but memories stay forever.
— Unknown
Some people are going to leave, but that’s not the end of your story. That’s the end of their part in your story.
— Faraaz Kazi
A special friend is hard to find, hard to lose, and impossible to forget.
— Unknown
The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
— Elizabeth Foley
What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. For all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
— Helen Keller
True friendship is like sound health: the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.
— Charles Caleb Colton
No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other’s worth.
— Robert Southey
You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can’t forget. Those are your friends.
— Mark Twain
As we grow up, we don’t lose friends — we just learn who our real ones are.
— Unknown
At some point, you have to realize that some people can stay in your heart but not in your life.
— Unknown
Saying goodbye doesn’t mean anything. It’s the time we spent together that matters, not how we left it.
— Trey Parker
Losing friends and grief quotes
Tell your friend that, in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.
— Tyron Edwards
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 fulfil the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.
— Henry David Thoreau
You don’t know who is important to you until you actually lose them.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Death ends a life, not a relationship.
— Jack Lemmon
We need to grieve the ones we’ve lost — not to sustain our connection to suffering, but to sustain our connection to love.
— Jennifer Williamson
Every deceased friend is a magnet drawing us into another world.
— Eliza Cook
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
When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure.
— Unknown
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
When our friends are alive, we see the good qualities they lack; dead, we remember only those they possessed.
— Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
The bond between friends cannot be broken by chance; no interval of time or space can destroy it. Not even death itself can part true friends.
— John Cassian
Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.
— David Hume
Don’t be surprised if you grieve more for a friend than you did for a recently deceased relative. The old saying, “you pick your friends, relatives are thrust upon you” holds true here. Friends are special people in our eyes because we hold them to be. Friends fill time in our lives that will be vacant when they die.
— Helen Fitzgerald
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
One of the difficult things about growing older is that you start losing so many friends. On the other hand, the older you get, the less time you have to wait until you see them again.
— Ron Brackin
A true friend is never truly gone. Their spirit leaves on in the memories of those who loved them.
— Amy Hoover
A friend who dies is something of you that dies.
— Gustave Flaubert
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
Grief is the price we pay for love.
— Queen Elizabeth II
Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face, and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends — that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
— Sir William Penn
When one has lost a friend, one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation.
— Seneca
Losing fake friends quotes
Don’t feel sad over someone who gave up on you. Feel sorry for them because they gave up on someone who would have never given up on them.
— Frank Ocean
I’d rather have no friends than fake ones.
— Unknown
Sometimes it’s not the people who change, it’s the mask that falls off.
— Unknown
You lose people masquerading as friends, and you’re better for it.
— Mandy Hale
Some people aren’t loyal to you. They are loyal to their needs of you. Once their needs change, so does their loyalty.
— Unknown
A false friend and a shadow attend only while the sun shines.
— Benjamin Franklin
Fake friends are around when they think you’re cool. True friends are around even when they think you’re a fool.
— Unknown
False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.
— Christian Nestell Bovee
It is far better to be alone than to be in bad company.
— George Washington
People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don’t think that’s true; being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.
— Kim Culbertson
Before you count your friends, make sure you can count on them.
— Unknown
Sometimes you have to give up on people. Not because you don’t care, but because they don’t.
— Jennifer Green
Stop worrying about someone who isn’t worried about you.
— Mitchell Perry
That friendship will not continue to the end which is begun for an end.
— Francis Quarles
Short losing friends quotes
Life without a friend is like death without a witness.
— John Ray
Half of me is missing, and the other half is missing you.
— Ranata Suzuki
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.
— E. B. White
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
— G. K. Chesterton
The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
— Sir Francis Bacon
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.
— Dr. Seuss
It’s sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.
— Henry Rollins
The death of a friend is equivalent to the loss of a limb.
— German proverb
The loss of a friend is the greatest of losses.
— Publilius Syrus
Just remember: some come, some go.
— Marilyn Monroe
You can gain a friend in a year, but lose a friend in a minute.
— Unknown
Can miles truly separate you from friends?
— Richard Bach
The older you get, the more you live with ghosts.
— Nick Tosches
That’s what life is about: people come and go.
— Cecelia Ahern
Which of these resonates with you the most? Let me know with a comment! 👇
