"Love has no age, no limit, and no death.”
This quote, by novelist and playwright John Galsworthy, hints at why it’s so important to find the right words to honor one who has passed on.
Depending on your situation and culture, there are many ways you could use quotes to remember a loved one. A few options include:
adding your grief quote to an online memorial
using a quote to remember a loved one in a eulogy
adding the quote to a memorial slideshow.
We’ve compiled a list of 52 hand-picked quotes to help you celebrate the life and legacy of someone you love. Each one is special in its own way, and they all offer hope and comfort during difficult times. May they bring you some peace and healing as you mourn your loss.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. — Soren Kierkegaard
Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't. — Richard Bach
Love has no age, no limit, and no death. — John Galsworthy
Every blade in the field, every leaf in the forest, lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. — Henry David Thoreau
Then I heard a voice from heaven say, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Yes,” says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.” — Revelations 14:13
You gave me a forever within the numbered days. — John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. — Clarence Budington Kelland
Grief is just love with no place to go. — Jamie Anderson
What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us. — Helen Keller
I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains. — Anne Frank
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart. — Helen Keller
We are born of love; Love is our mother. — Rumi
Death ends a life, not a relationship. — Mitch Albom
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. — Aristotle
Time is a physician that heals every grief. — Diphilus
While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil. — John Taylor
If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. — James O’Barr
It is the capacity to feel consuming grief and pain and despair that also allows me to embrace love and joy and beauty with my whole heart. I must let it all in. — Anna White
Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened. — Dr. Seuss
I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss. — Rita Mae Brown
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. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly — that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. — Anne Lamott
Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning. — Anna Quindlen
Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. — Kahlil Gibran
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. —Albert Einstein
In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. — Abraham Lincoln
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. — Maya Angelou
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. — Romans 6:23
God shall wipe all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. — Revelations 21: 4
Say not in grief that she is no more, but say in thankfulness that she was. — Hebrew proverb
For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. — William Penn
Death cannot kill what never dies. — William Penn
Although our hearts hurt and mourn in humanly pain
The fact still remains the same
That Heaven Has Gained more Love
To sprinkle down from above
— Antonio Talbert
You don't know who is important to you until you actually lose them. — Mahatma Gandhi
One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can. — Frederick Buechner
That best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. — William Wordsworth
It’s always hard to lose somebody. It leaves a hole in your heart that never grows back. — Kevin Brooks
There are no good-byes, where ever you'll be, you'll be in my heart. — Ghandi
Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean. — David Searls
They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. — William Penn
Not long enough to hold his hand, this amazing person, this loving man. — Kelly Horn
What we have once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us. — Helen Keller
How very softly you tiptoed into our world, almost silently, only a moment you stayed. But what an imprint you footsteps have left upon our hearts. — Dorothy Ferguson
Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality. — Emily Dickinson
Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. — Rossiter Worthington Raymond
Moments before our walk that afternoon; I realized the path ended too soon. — Kelly Horn
I cannot say and I will not say
That she is dead, she is just away.
With a cheery smile and a wave of hand
She has wandered into an unknown land;
And left us dreaming how very fair
Its needs must be, since she lingers there.
And you-oh you, who the wildest yearn
From the old-time step and the glad return-
Think of her faring on, as dear
In the love of there, as the love of here
Think of her still the same way, I say;
She is not dead, she is just away.
— James Whitcomb Riley
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes.
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
— Francis Bourdillon
Say not in grief: "He is no more", but live in thankfulness that he was. — Hebrew proverb
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
A death is not the extinguishing of a light, but the putting out of the lamp because the dawn has come. — Rabindranath Tagore
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
God could not be everywhere, and therefore, he made mothers. — Jewish proverb
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. — A Vietnamese saying