48 Heartfelt Remembrance Quotes

Losing someone we love is undeniably one of life's greatest challenges, and finding the right words to articulate our emotions can often be difficult. Heartfelt remembrance quotes can serve as a comforting source of solace, providing a gentle reminder that while our loved ones may no longer be physically present, their spirit and influence poignantly linger on in our lives. In this collection, we have curated 48 touching quotes that capture the essence of remembrance, offering you meaningful ways to honor and cherish the memories of those dear to your heart. Whether you are seeking words for a eulogy, a tribute, or simply a personal moment of reflection, these quotes are intended to bring comfort and peace during times of mourning and remembrance.

1. “Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

2. “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” - Thomas Campbell

3. “You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” - Jane Austen

4. “One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.” - Antonio Porchia

5. “In great deeds, something abides. On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls… generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.” - Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

6. “The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” - Frederick Buechner

7. “The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.” - Czesław Miłosz

8. “There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.” - Isabel Allende

9. “Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.” - Zora Neale Hurston

10. “Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturnAnd broils roots out the work of masonry,Nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till judgement that yourself arise,You in this, and dwell in lovers eyes.” - William Shakespeare

11. “because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. no matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment.” - Sarah Dessen

12. “When I'm dead, I want to be remembered as a musician of some worth and substance.” - Freddie Mercury

13. “As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.” - Thomas Pynchon

14. “The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interred with their bones.” - William Shakespeare

15. “There is no death in remembrance. Remember me, Sarah. Remember me, and a part of me will always be with you." - Martha Carrier to her daughter, Sarah Carrier” - Kathleen Kent

16. “You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay.” - Murasaki Shikibu

17. “Any time gone by was better.” - Jorge Manrique

18. “Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.” - Giorgio Agamben

19. “You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.” - Amy Tan

20. “When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.” - Margaret Atwood

21. “You are remembered for the rules you break.” - Douglas MacArthur

22. “There are two ways to live a life either forget everything or, remember nothing.” - Santosh Kalwar

23. “People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.” - Stephen Carpenter

24. “Music is powerful; it transforms emotions and experiences into something tangible.” - Michelle Madow

25. “...we should be remembered for the things we do. The things we do are the most important things of all. They are more important than what we say or what we look like. The things we do outlast our mortality. The things we do are like monuments that people build to honour heroes after they've died. They're like the pyramids that the Egyptians built to honour the Pharaohs. Only instead of being made out of stone, they're made out of the memories people have of you. That's why your deeds are like your monuments. Built with memories instead of with stone.” - R.J. Palacio

26. “Because in some other universe, you are me, I am you, and we are perfectly happy together. Or perhaps not… and just like this…” - Abhimanyu Jha

27. “Wie ich heimschritt bemerkte ich mit einemmal vor mir meinen eigenen Schatten so wie ich den Schatten des anderen Krieges hinter dem jetzigen sah. Er ist durch all diese Zeit nicht mehr von mir gewichen dieser Schatten er überhing jeden meiner Gedanken bei Tag und bei Nacht vielleicht liegt sein dunkler Umriß auch auf manchen Blättern dieses Buches. Aber jeder Schatten ist im letzten doch auch Kind des Lichts und nur wer Helles und Dunkles Krieg und Frieden Aufstieg und Niedergang erfahren nur der hat wahrhaft gelebt.” - Stefan Zweig

28. “What you remember saves you.” - W. S. Merwin

29. “I have to live if I want to be remembered.” - Suzanne Young

30. “We all have an inner voice, our personal whisper from the universe. All we have to do is listen -- feel and sense it with an open heart. Sometimes it whispers of intuition or precognition. Other times, it whispers an awareness, a remembrance from another plane. Dare to listen. Dare to hear with your heart.” - C.J. Heck

31. “Should I ever again sink into illness, I'm sure I'll remember Eldric. I'll remember he cared for me. I'll remember that someone had at least taken the time to touch my face.” - Franny Billingsley

32. “It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory” - Paulo Coelho

33. “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.” - Laurence Binyon

34. “He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.” - Annie Proulx

35. “After all these years, my heart still wants you. It still misses you. it still aches for you. I can't control what my heart wants, I could just deny it of it... Love, Viv” - Eveli Acosta

36. “Forget about how you’ll be perceived after you’re gone because the world will remember you the way it wants to, and you get very little say in it. You could campaign for freedom every single day of your existence and yet only be attributed with saying something tragically stupid at precisely the wrong moment. It’s just the way it goes.” - Ellie Rose McKee

37. “I sometimes think about old tombs and weedsThat interwreathe among the bones of kingsWith cold and poisonous berry and black flower:Or ruminate upon the skulls of steedsFrailer than shells and on those luminous wings -The shoulder blades of Princes of fled power,Which now the unrecorded sandstorms grindInto so wraith-like a translucencyOf tissue-thin and aqueous bone- A Reverie of Bone” - Mervyn Peake

38. “Here's to us, who's like us Damn few, and they're all dead.” - Rabbie Burns

39. “I want you,” Drew said. “Just you. I used to go through every day without thinking about the future, but with you all I can see are the possibilities of the experiences we could have together.” - Michelle Madow

40. “Feeling like I had to lose you for the second time...” He shook his head, and I thought I saw tears under his eyes. “I don’t think I could bear it. You’re everything to me, Elizabeth.” - Michelle Madow

41. “Sixty-five years ago [written 2009], in a brief lull between storms in a remarkably stormy June, even by the standards of Channel weather, the heirs of Harold and the kinsmen of the Conqueror came to Normandy. They were supported by the remnants of their first, North American, empire, the two great nations that they had planted in the New World in the time of Good Queen Bess and James 6th and 1st: the Americans, who had rebelled in the name of the rights of Englishmen, and the Canadians, who had stood loyal in the name of the Crown. … The honours of these regiments are ancient and moving: Minden and Malplaquet, Mysore, Badajoz, Waterloo, Inkerman, Gallipoli, the Somme, Imjin. None shines more brightly than Normandy 1944. The paths of glory may lead but to the grave; yet all, even golden boys and girls, must come to dust. It is a better path to the grave than any of the others, not because glory is something to seek, but because, not once or twice in our long island story, the way of duty has been the path to glory; and duty is to be done. …Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” - G.M.W. Wemyss

42. “Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And Life, the shadow of death.” - Algernon Charles Swinburne

43. “Now it's your land. But it's important, at least to me,that you remember that it's not just your land. There is a history. Now you're part of it. Good night. And off they go.” - Robert Goolrick

44. “There is in this valley a beating heart. It is always and ever there. And when I am gone, it will beat for you and when you are gone, it will beat for your children and theirs, forever. Forever. Until there is no water, no air, no green in the spring or gold in the autumn, no stars in the sky or wind from the north. And when you cannot speak, it will speak for you. When you cannot see, it will be your eyes. When you cannot remember, it will be your memory. It will never forget you. And when you cannot be faithful, it will save a place for your return. This is a gift to you. It cannot be taken away. It is yours forever. It is the narrative of this world, and the scrapbook of your own small life, and, when you are gone into ash and darkness and the grave, it will tell your story.” - Robert Goolrick

45. “This I have known, and these have come againWith echoing happiness in heart and brain;Time standing still, surrendering to meBeauty that otherwise would cease to be.- Time Stands” - William Kean Seymour

46. “The first day of spring, the vernal equinox—the season of renewal when the earth sheds its winter cloak, flowers bloom, and the heart feels as though everything is once again imaginable. The smell of fresh-cut grass, shagging fly balls, and scraping mud from baseball cleats. A brief contemplation and tear for those gone from the field, their easy laugh and nimble sprint no longer gracing the game.” - Galen Watson

47. “If during this time, or some other time we were separated, I wouldn't forget you. I'd recall how many years have passed knowing you.” - Tomoko Yamashita

48. “. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.” - Denis Johnson