Gain solace through our curated selection of one sided love quotes that highlights loving someone who may never love you back.
One–sided love, encapsulates the delicate dance of affection and longing between two individuals. It’s a realm where emotions flow unilaterally, where the heart yearns for a connection that might never be fully reciprocated.
This unrequited affection has inspired countless poets, writers, and philosophers throughout history. To capture the essence of longing and the intensity of unreciprocated emotions, we gathered a collection of one sided love quotes.
These quotes capture the essence of longing, encapsulating the raw intensity of emotions felt when love remains unanswered. They provide solace to those who have experienced the ache of loving without being loved in return, reminding us that our feelings are both valid and shared.
Each quote is a glimpse into the depths of unreciprocated emotions, a testament to the courage it takes to hold onto affection that may never find its way back. So, join us in exploring these poignant one sided love quotes, and let the words resonate with the depths of your own heart.
Sad one sided love quotes

You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once–requited love cannot.
John Green
Birds sing even when the world is filled with sadness. I don’t know why people can’t do the same thing.
Michael Gilbert
When you have an uneasy feeling that happiness is beginning to slip through your fingers you hang on as tightly as you can; you don’t give it an added push away from you.
Cornell Woolrich
If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.
Stendhal
It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.
Naomi Alderman
Loving you was like jumping into the dark side of a pool, and drowning.
Lori Jenessa Nelson
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have– to want and want– how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
Virginia Woolf
When you truly love someone, you don’t hurt or cause them pain, that’s how I painfully realized you didn’t love me.
Michael Hayssus
When you loved someone and had to let them go, there will always be that small part of yourself that whispers. What was it that you wanted and why didn’t you fight for it.
Shannon L. Alder
The pain of one–sided love, of knowing that I had loved her more than she had loved m.
Sierra Simone
Heart broken one sided love quotes

Nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.
Gregory David Roberts
The brokenhearted are the bravest among us. They dared to love.
Brené Brown
Lies destroy. But, you don’t have to stay broken forever.
Marjory Sheba
People may say no one ever died of a broken heart, but when you’re suffering from one, it sure doesn’t feel that way; at least initially.
Paula Heller Garland
The heart is heaviest when it’s empty and lightest when it’s full.
Helen Scott Taylor
True love is away from all deception. It can survive in the cracks of the broken heart.
Ruchita Bahl
A second chance will never be able to heal the wound of the first one.
Laura Chouette
They say heartbreak is a blessing. It helps you grow and turns you into a better, more powerful person. You become as strong as a beast.
Priyanka Agarwal
A tormented mind wants to forget, what a broken heart will always remember.
Anthony Liccione
I know this sounds crazy to say after one encounter but I kind of fell for you pretty hard and it has been forever since I’ve connected to anyone like this and my heart is kind of broken in a million pieces.
BJ Novak
Pain one sided love quotes

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Although he doesn’t know it yet, she isn’t his real life. But he is hers. This is painful.
Margaret Atwood
Do you know what it’s like to like someone so much you can’t stand it and know that they’ll never feel the same way.
Jenny Han
She still loves him. This is the fact she wakes up to each morning. She checks it, sometimes, a tongue probing an aching tooth, making sure it still hurts.
Hala Alyan
At first it was simply liking, Nastenka, but now, now! I am just in the same position, as you were when you went to him with your bundle. In a worse position than you, Nastenka, because he cared for no one else as you do.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Theo wanted to call him back. But then he thought, oh let him go, there’s no mending a fruitless love, it just has to be endured.
Iris Murdoch
I’m chasing you. I’m going to chase you until you give this a chance.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Moreover, and of course, she loved him; but in Sefton’s stern code her love had always been chained up, and howled fruitlessly, as indeed it did now.
Iris Murdoch
Maybe that’s when the tears first fell, bleeding out through the fissures of his shattered soul.
Luísa Hörlle de Castro
I wish I had the guts to walk away from what we had. But I can’t because I know you won’t come after me, and that’s what hurts the most.
Spencer Shirks
One way love quotes

Unfortunately, loving someone doesn’t obligate them to love you back.
J. Matthew Nespoli
The biggest curse in life is not losing your love, but not being loved by someone you love.
Kiran Joshi
When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.
Sylvia Plath
You just know something is amiss, when you look at someone and long for something that is not yours or you cannot have. It’s an absence–a loss of a heartbeat.
Nadège Richards
Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it.
James Patterson
Unrequited love does not die; it’s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.
Ellie Newmark
Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn’t love you.
Tennessee Williams
The great unrequited love tears open your heart to the beauty of the world, its small rivers and upland meadows. It also makes you kinder to the next hundred thousand persons who cross your path.
Garrison Keillor
I came hoping to see those eyes, but instead I return with my heart, leaving behind only flowers.
Kim Dong Hwa
The worst feeling is falling for someone and knowing that they won’t be there to catch you.
Rashida Rowe
Bittersweet one sided love quotes

Explore poignant one sided love quotes that capture the raw feelings of loving someone from afar. Delve into the depths of unreciprocated emotions through these powerful words.
Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free; love me no more, but love my love of thee.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
I knew you didn’t love me, but I dangerously adored you anyways.
R. YS Perez
What made you feel that stomach–churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
Ann Brashares
I am sleeping with unreciprocated love, while the arms of hope wrap around me.
Faith Herndon
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
Save me from the love that is unreal… the love that only tries to steal. For love that wants only to abscess, is not love at all, nor is its caress.
Joli Darling
Love may have the longest arms, but it can still fall short of an embrace.
Megan McCafferty
Have you ever felt like begging someone not to let you go but deep down you’ve always known he doesn’t really care one way or the other if you’re there or not?
Laarni Venus Marie
When you find that rare person who really knows who you are, and they still don’t love you.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.
William Shakespeare
One sided love quotes short

Dive into a world of unrequited emotions with our thoughtfully selected one sided love quotes. Let these words provide comfort and resonance for those familiar with the pain of loving without being loved back.
Problems can be fixed. But unrequited love is a tragedy.
Suzanne Harper
The right people will appreciate you, but the wrong ones never will.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
I wish I knew how to quit you.
Annie Proulx
The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.
Nuala O’Faolain
Our time is up. Trying to make this work, it ain’t enough one–sided love.
Blackbear
He was both everything I could ever want… And nothing I could ever have.
Ranata Suzuki
They say “Follow your heart” … But I can’t follow you where you’re going.
Ranata Suzuki
Think of you! I do not think of you; you are always before my soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You can sacrifice and not love. But you cannot love and not sacrifice.
Kris Vallotton
Unrequited love is not an affront to man but raises him.
Alexander Pushkin
Moving on one sided love quotes

Discover a collection of moving one sided love quotes that eloquently express the ache of loving without reciprocity. Let these quotes resonate with your own emotions and experiences.
Love from one side hurts, but love from two sides heals.
William Shakespeare
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
Sigmund Freud
You can give birth to a beautiful, perfect human being, but requited love isn’t guaranteed for her–or for any of us.
Elin Hilderbrand
The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.
P. Morgan
So I am hanging on to the bumper and life goes on and the car goes on, and I get really badly bruised and I’m hitting potholes. And it hurts. It really hurts. So yesterday I had to let go of the bumper. Because it hurts too much.
Lorelai Gilmore
If you really want closure… at some point, you have to shut the door.
Jacki Wells Wunderlin
There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C.S. Lewis
You’re the queen of pushing people away before they can say they like you. The queen of rejecting first so you can’t be rejected.
Maggie Ann Martin
I really believe in, ‘Move on, live and let live, forgive and forget.’
Kate Winslet
Don’t you ever let another put their hands on something that’s already yours, because you might end up breaking your own heart.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Overcoming one sided love quotes

I’ve enough pride never to let myself love a man who does not love me.
Leo Tolstoy
We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
Sam Keen
Everytime you enter the melancholic tunnel of unrequited love, you will get out of that tunnel with a less cheerful heart but with a more mature mind.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
Although love unreturned can drive you to despair, trust that somewhere out there, someone is waiting just for you.
Laura Ramirez
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
Mark Twain
This is one of the great human mysteries: why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good.
Robert Pinsky
To know true love, even though it was impossible to keep, had finally cracked her heart open enough to let someone else in.
Andrea Hurst
Love that we cannot have is the one that lasts the longest, hurts the deepest, but feels the strongest.
William Shakespeare
The heart is stubborn. It holds onto love despite what sense and emotion tells it. And it is often, in the battle of those three, the most brilliant of all.
Alessandra Torre
Stop giving energy to the things you don’t want.
Wayne Dyer
Quotes about one sided love
To outlive ones love means to suffer, but to never love means to die.
Laura Chouette
I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand. And when the light has long since gone … I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.
Ranata Suzuki
Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead.
Adele
There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.
Laini Taylor
[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.
Kristan Higgins
Sometimes truth is a kind of love not many hearts can bear.
Laura Chouette
Most people have a harder time letting themselves love than finding someone to love them.
Bill Russell
Some people might find that strange. But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.
Ranata Suzuki
And still after all this time, the Sun has never said to the earth, You owe me. Look what happens with love like that, it lights up the sky.
Rumi
Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue–black sky is for suckers or maniacs.
Alice Hoffman
Letting go of one sided love quotes
No relationship in this world ever remains warm and close unless good effort is made on both sides to keep it so.
Eleanor Roosevelt
If you love and get hurt, love more. If you love more and hurt more, love even more. If you love even more and get hurt even more, love some more until it hurts no more.
William Shakespeare
Love isn’t always perfect. It isn’t a fairy tale or a storybook. And it doesn’t always come easy.
Linda Lapointe
I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.
Jodi Picoult
Never make someone a priority, when all you are to them is an option.
Maya Angelou
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
Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.
J.M. Barrie
I didn’t call you because I’m tired of you only wanting me around when you need something. I’m tired of watching you be in love with someone else – someone, incidentally, who will never love you back. Not the way I do.
Cassandra Clare
Never fall in love with someone that won’t fight for you because when the real battles begin they won’t pull your heart to safety, but they will their own.
Shannon L. Alder
I wanted to punch him and understand him at the same time.
Shannon A. Thompson
Final thoughts
While one sided love may appear as an unbalanced equation, these words teach us that it’s a profound journey of self–discovery. Our collection of one sided love quotes encourage us to embrace these feelings, no matter how unreciprocated they may be.
As we journey through the landscape of these quotes, we find solace in knowing that our experiences of loving without reciprocity are shared by countless souls across time. So, keep these one sided love quotes close to your heart.
We hope that your exploration of these one sided love quotes has been both resonant and encouraging. Allow these quotes serve as a beacon of comfort, reminding you that you are not alone in navigating the complexities of unrequited love.
Carry the hope and strength from these one sided love quotes with you, to shapes your journey and enriches your spirit. May you continue to cherish the beauty of love in all its forms, knowing that the emotions expressed in these quotes echo the feelings of countless hearts across time.