William Shakespeare
Playwright, Poet
"If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die."
Unrequited Love quotes
Unrequited Love
80 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
John Green
Author, YouTuber
"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."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
"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."
Sylvia Plath
Poet, Novelist
"When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever."
Tina Brown
Editor and Author
"Powerful women always interpret hostility as unrequited love."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside unrequited love — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Unrequited Love quotes (page 1 of 4)
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"Stop giving energy to the things you don't want."
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"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
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"It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man."
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"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."
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"I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness."
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"Love songs in particular are so compelling because love is probably the strongest emotion you can have, and I think it's relatable to absolutely everyone, whether it's unrequited love or love."
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"To know the piano is to know the universe. To master the piano is to master the universe. The spectrum of piano sound acts as a prism through which all musical and non-musical sounds may be filtered. The grunts of sheep, the braying of mules, the popping of champagne corks, the sighs of unrequited love, not to mention the full lexicon of sounds available to all other instruments-including whistles, scrapes, bleatings, caresses, thuds, hoots, plus sweet and sour pluckings-fall within the sovereignty of this most bare and dissembling chameleon."
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"The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love."
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"Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this."
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"I think there's nothing more painful for anyone than unrequited love. If you've ever had that kind of physical access to someone and then, all of a sudden, that is denied, and yet you're still in love with that person, it's very, very, very painful to be around that person in a certain way."
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"My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be"
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"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."
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"You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot."
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"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."
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"Theres so many other things to write about than unrequited love."
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"Unrequited love is as different from the mutual love as the error from the truth."
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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."
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"My album focuses on unrequited love quite a lot because I don't think it's spoken about enough in music. I've been through it myself and I found it hard to find songs that were about that, so I've definitely tried to make that a part of my album."
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"How many young men, in all previous times of unprecedented steadiness, had turned suddenly wild and wicked for the same reason, and, in an ecstasy of unrequited love, taken to wrench off door-knockers, and invert the boxes of rheumatic watchmen!"
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"I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love."
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