There are a few things worse than a broken heart — those who know, know. Here are 30 emotional heartbreak quotes that we can all relate to.

There are a few things worse than a heartbreak — those who know, know. It’s hard to get over a love full of lifelong promises that suddenly came to an end.

You’re experiencing tons of mixed feelings. Maybe you’re still in love with that person and hope to get back together. On the other hand you are angry, deeply sad and confused.

A breakup can make us do crazy things. We’re so desperate to reconcile that we might go to dramatic and even embarrassing lengths. After all, we need to assure and reassure ourselves that we did all we could to save our relationship.

The truth is we would never really what love is without pain, and most of us experience at least one excruciating heartbreak before finding another love that can put the pieces of our broken heart back together.

Why do breakups hurt so much? Because love acts like an addiction, as far as your brain is concerned. So give yourself enough time to overcome that addiction.

Here are 30 emotional heartbreak quotes that we can all relate to:

The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart — hearts are made to be broken — but that it turns one’s heart to stone.

OSCAR WILDE (more Oscar Wilde quotes)

The hottest love has the coldest end.

SOCRATES (more Socrates quotes)

Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime.

MINEKO IWASAKI

The broken heart. You think you will die, but you keep living, day after day after terrible day.

CHARLES DICKENS

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

KHALIL GIBRAN (more Kahlil Gibran quotes)

There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream — whatever that dream might be.

PEARL S. BUCK

It is strange how often a heart must be broken before the years can make it wise.

SARA TEASDALE

Then his heart, now broken into a thousand pieces, slowly began to turn to ice.

MORGAN RHODES

Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE

My feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping but I shall go on living.

PABLO NERUDA (more Pablo Neruda quotes)

Pleasure of love lasts but a moment. Pain of love lasts a lifetime.

BETTE DAVIS

When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters anymore. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?

LEO TOLSTOY (more Leo Tolstoy quotes)

The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it…

NICHOLAS SPARKS

So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.

E.A. BUCCHIANERI

I wish I were a little girl again because skinned knees are easier to fix than a broken heart.

JULIA ROBERTS

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted — atrocious.

MARCEL PROUST (more Marcel Proust quotes)

It is strange how often a heart must be broken before the years can make it wise.

SARA TEASDALE

Perhaps someday I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

SYLVIA PLATH

The heart will break, but broken live on.

LORD BYRON

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you’d been before the fall.

JODI PICOULT

You can’t buy love, but you can pay heavily for it.

HENNY YOUNGMAN

Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.

STEPHEN KING

When your heart is broken, you plant seeds in the cracks and you pray for rain.

ANDREA GIBSON

Perhaps someday I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

SYLVIA PLATH (more Sylvia Plath quotes)

Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

MARILYN MONORE (more Marilyn Monroe quotes)

The greatest tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.

MARK TWAIN (more Mark Twain quotes)

Loving you was like going to war; I never came back the same.

WARSAN SHIRE

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

NEIL GAIMAN