Discover insight and wisdom within our enchanting collection of shadow quotes that delve into the captivating interplay of light and darkness.
In the interplay of light and darkness, we find not only visual marvel but also a reflection of the human condition. Shadows hold a unique place as they symbolize far more than mere absence of light.
Shadows are the silent storytellers of our lives, casting their intricate patterns on our experiences. To provide solace and enlightenment, our selection of shadow quotes has the power to transform your perception.
In this curated collection of shadow quotes, we delve to the realm where darkness and light dance in a delicate, eternal waltz. Through the words of poets, writers, or thinkers, we explore the symbolism and emotional resonance that shadows evoke.
Join us on this evocative exploration as we delve into the mesmerizing world of 120 shadow quotes. Reveal the beauty, mystery, and wisdom that can be found in the spaces where light meets darkness.
Self shadow quotes

Be your own leader, be your own self, step out of my shadows and be your own person.
Snoop Dogg
Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light. Above all things reverence thyself.
Pythagoras
No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere.
Haruki Murakami
Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.
Junichiro Tanizaki
Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.
Immanuel Kant
We all have a dark side. Most of us go through life avoiding direct confrontation with that aspect of ourselves, which I call the shadow self. There’s a reason why. It carries a great deal of energy.
Lorraine Toussaint
If a man’s shadow is brighter than himself, than that man becomes the shadow itself!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self.
Andre Aciman
I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.
Sylvia Plath
Dark shadow quotes

The shadows are only the darkest when the light is at its brightest.
Glenn Beck
Don’t depend too much on anyone in this world because even your own shadow leaves you when you are in darkness.
Ibn Taymiyyah
The brightest flame casts the darkest shadow.
George R. R. Martin
There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.
Charles Dickens
To speak with the shadow, you must know the language of the darkness!
Mehmet Murat İldan
Has the dark shadow really disappeared? Or is it inside me, concealed, waiting for its chance to reappear? Like a clever thief hidden inside a house, breathing quietly, waiting until everyone’s asleep.
Haruki Murakami
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings, always darker, emptier, and simpler.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To rid ourselves of our shadows, who we are, we must step into either total light or total darkness. Goodness and evil.
Jeremy P. Johnson
No matter how hard you fight the darkness, every light casts a shadow, and the closer you get to the light, the darker that shadow becomes.
Plato
A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don’t want to see.
Terry Tempest Williams
Shadow quotes about life

Life is short, and time is swift / Roses fade, and shadows shift.
Ebenezer Elliott
If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.
Joseph Addison
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.
Diane Ackerman
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset.
Crowfoot
Life is a mixture of light and shadow. Calm and storm, and it’s all good.
Susan W. Krebs
Befriend your shadow, and life will be easier.
Robert Jabert
Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.
Oscar Wilde
This wordly life is like a shadow. If you try to catch it, you will never be able to do so. If you turn your back towards it, it has no choice but to follow you.
Ibn Qayyim Al–Jawziyya
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
Leo Tolstoy
Shadow quotes about death

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.
Thomas Browne
Loss and possession, death and life are one. There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.
Hilaire Belloc
In this world we find that all happiness is followed by misery as its shadow. Life has its shadow, death.
Swami Vivekananda
We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It’s hard to argue with death as a game–changer.
Bryan Fuller
The shadow of mortality is the backdrop against which the beauty of life truly shines.
Unknown
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
Leo Tolstoy
Every life has death, and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will.
Mary Stewart
I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.
H. P. Lovecraft
There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.
Nelson Mandela
I think that light and shadow have exactly the same duality that exists between life and death.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo
Shadow love quotes

Love that ends is the shadow of love; true love is without beginning or end.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
Now you know how much my love for you burns deep in me when I forget about our emptiness, and deal with shadows as with solid things.
Dante Alighieri
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
Pablo Neruda
Love is like a shadow, one can only catch it by falling into it.
Ambrose
Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl Jung
Love is a naked shadow, On a gnarled and naked tree.
Langston Hughes
I’m afraid of love, because it involves things that are beyond our understanding; it sheds such a brilliant light, but the shadow it casts frightens me.
Paulo Coelho
Sometimes you grow to love the shadow that follows.
Donna Lynn Hope
Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement, to the grip on life that beats in your breast, with the wings of a submerged swan. So that our dream might reply to the sky’s questioning stars with one key, one door closed to shadow.
Pablo Neruda
Both light and shadow are the dance of love.
Rumi
Shadow work quotes

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
Michelangelo
Where I am today is my starting point. Who I am today is my starting point. My failures and successes of the past, my fears and hopes of the future are all shadows. Today is my reality, and I’ll use it to create my world.
Taylor Stevens
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
Abraham Lincoln
Every light has its shadow, and every shadow hath a succeeding morning.
Nicolaus Copernicus
The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
Carl Jung
No man can walk so long in the shadow that he cannot come again to the light.
Robert Jordan
The more cut off and unconscious we are of our personal shadows, the more vulnerable we are to having those shadows break out and be set free for a time by addictive behaviors.
Carl Jung
Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you.
Walt Whitman
The shadow that hidden, repressed, for the most part, inferior and guilt–laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our annual ancestors.
C.G. Jung
I decided long ago never to walk in anyone’s shadow; if I fail, or if I succeed at least I did as I believe.
Whitney Houston
Shadow quotes short

There is no light without shadow, just as there is no happiness without pain.
Isabel Allende
Your identity is like your shadow: not always visible and yet always present.
Fausto Cercignani
It is only through shadows that one comes to know the light.
St. Catherine of Siena
Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Remember, you have no companions but your shadow.
Genghis Khan
I like my shadow; it reminds me that I exist.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.
Carl Jung
Some there be that shadow kiss; Such have but a shadow’s bliss.
William Shakespeare
The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.
Gregory Maguire
A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.
John Keats
Shadow quotes for Instagram

We are but dust and shadow.
Horace
There is strong shadow where there is much light.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That’s not my shadow, that’s my darkness.
S.L. Jennings
A human being is only breath and shadow.
Sophocles
You can only come to the morning through the shadows.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Light is easy to love. Show me your darkness.
Randy Queen
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow.
Thomas Campion
Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.
Euripedes
Be kind to your shadow.
Rebecca Lawless
A light here required a shadow there.
Virginia Woolf
Out of the shadow quotes

The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
Frank Lloyd Wright
When all you can feel are the shadows, turn your face towards the sun.
Helen Keller
Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.
Charlotte Whitton
We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.
Gautama Buddha
Don’t be afraid of the shadows, it only means there’s a light nearby.
Amy Lee
Capture a shadow, dance with the wind, stand in a rainbow, begin at the end.
Mary Anne Radmacher
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
Aesop
Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
Maurice Maeterlinck
In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
Shakti Gawain
When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
Lin Yutang
Shadow sayings

Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.
Swedish Proverb
The shadows: some hide, others reveal.
Antonio Porchia
Somethings can only be seen in the shadows.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The life of a human being is like a shadow.
Latin Proverb
Never judge things of which you only know the shadow.
Japanese Proverb
More than a shadow and less than a soul.
Anne Bishop
Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
When the tree falls, the shadow flies.
Chinese Proverb
Life is a shadow and a mist. It passes quickly by and is no more.
Malagasy Proverb
Peace follows love energy like a shadow.
Osho
Shadow quotes about friendship
My shadow serves as the friend I crave.
Anna Akhmatova
I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.
Plutarch
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
Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which increases with the setting sun of life.
Jean de La Fontaine
Adversity shows whether we have friends, or only the shadows of friends.
Publilius Syrus
A false friend and a shadow attend only while the sun shines.
Benjamin Franklin
Don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The most reliable friend you have is your shadow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.
Ray Bradbury
In life have a friend that is like a mirror and shadow; mirror doesn’t lie and shadow never leaves.
Unknown
Quotes about shadow
Even the purest cast a black shadow.
Kaitlyn Jones
When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.
Buddha
Do not live in the shadow of the masters forever. Learn to live in the light of your soul. Life deserves full expression.
Amit Ray
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
Carl Jung
Unless you learn to face your own shadows, you will continue to see them in others because the world outside you is only a reflection of the world inside you.
Carl Jung
The world is in balance. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
John Ruskin
Every man who walks the earth casts a shadow on the world. Some are thin and weak, others long and dark.
George R.R. Martin
Darkness is absence of light. Shadow is diminution of light.
Leonardo da Vinci
If you dont have any shadows you’re not in the light.
Lady Gaga
Final thoughts
In the spaces where light meets darkness, we find a reflection of our own journey–the contrast and the uncertainty. Shadow quotes encourage us to embrace the intricate nuances of existence and to seek wisdom in the hidden recesses of our hearts and minds.
These shadow quotes have served as windows into the rich tapestry of human emotions, experiences, and perceptions. Just as shadows shift and evolve, these words have transformed our understanding of this enigmatic phenomenon.
By reflect wisdom within these shadow quotes, allowed us to contemplate their symbolic significance in our own lives. So, let these quotes linger in your thoughts, casting their own unique shadows on your path.
Hope you have enjoyed this journey through the realm of shadow quotes, finding resonance in the interplay of light and darkness. May they inspire you to explore the beauty in life’s contrasts.
Thank you for embarking on this exploration with us into the world of shadow quotes. Remember, shadows may obscure, but they also reveal, and in that revelation, we discover the richness of our existence.