Breaking up—it happens to everyone. For most of us, it happens multiple times. Yet, why is it that every time you break up with someone, it feels so fresh and new? Maybe it’s because when you’re in the middle of moving on, it often feels like you’re stuck. You’re still thinking about the other person, still dwelling in the past, still feeling the feelings you felt, and still not ready to say goodbye. To help you realize you’re not alone, and give some much needed inspiration and advice from people who have been there before, we’ve compiled over 50 quotes about moving on.
From the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the lyrics of Ben Harper, to wise words from figures like Babe Ruth or Albert Camus, you’ll find moving on quotes to make you feel a little bit better about where you are and, hopefully, give you a little inspiration to move forward and move on.
If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.
– Paulo Coelho
It’s so hard to do, and so easy to say. But sometimes, sometimes, you just have to walk away.
– Ben Harper
If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.
– Mo Willems
An obstacle is often a stepping stone.
– Prescott Bush
Don’t regret the past, just learn from it.
– Ben Ipok
Turn your wounds into wisdom.
– Oprah Winfrey
Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
The best way out is always through.
– Robert Frost
Every moment is a fresh beginning.
– T.S. Eliot
Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.
– Babe Ruth
Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.
– Hermann Hesse
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need.
– Lao Tzu
Cry me a river, build a bridge, and get over it.
– Justin Timberlake
You will evolve past certain people. Let yourself.
– Mandy Hale
You can’t move forward if you’re still hanging on.
– Sue Fitzmaurice
The bottom line is this; when one person stops being a part of your life, another one will come, and fill that empty space.
– Ena Snow
She took a step and didn’t want to take any more, but she did.
– Markus Zusak
Get on with living and loving. You don’t have forever.
– Leo Buscaglia
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
– Pablo Neruda
Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said “Fuck it” and given up. It doesn’t go anywhere special, it’s just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much.
– Lorrie Moore
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing, not just a waiting.
– Susan Sontag
Listen, I’m going to give you some advice, not because I think you need it, but because I feel like I’ve earned it. The right, I mean. To give advice. Here it is: don’t hold onto things. It’s a problem the men in my family have. It’s taken me a long time to figure this out. Me, my father, my grandfather, we collect things. We collect miseries. It’s what we do. But sometimes the best thing to do is to just let things go. To let them pass.
– Joe Meno
Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you’re dreaming.
– Alice Walker
This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all.
The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.
This is what happens.
– Alice Munro
Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It’s always there, though.
– Jeffrey Eugenides
It’s time to say goodbye, but I think goodbyes are sad and I’d much rather say hello. Hello to a new adventure. – Ernie Harwell
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
– Albert Camus
Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.
– Isabel Allende
The heart will break, but broken live on.
– Lord Byron
I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
– Samuel Beckett
Goodbye baby, that is all I have to left to say.
But you have lost your good thing,
Go ahead and have your own way.
– Muddy Waters/ McKinely Morganfield
Get out of my eyes teardrops, I’ve got to see my way around.
– Allen Toussaint
There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
– Raymond Carver
I understand feeling as small and as insignificant as humanly possible. And how it can actually ache in places you didn’t know you had inside you. And it doesn’t matter how many new haircuts you get, or gyms you join, or how many glasses of chardonnay you drink with your girlfriends… you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong or how you could have misunderstood. And how in the hell for that brief moment you could think that you were that happy. And sometimes you can even convince yourself that he’ll see the light and show up at your door. And after all that, however long all that may be, you’ll go somewhere new. And you’ll meet people who make you feel worthwhile again. And little pieces of your soul will finally come back. And all that fuzzy stuff, those years of your life that you wasted, that will eventually begin to fade.
– Iris Simpkins (Kate Winslet) from The Holiday
A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein—
that sudden rush of the world.
– Ellen Bass
She was gone, and all that was left was the space you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
– Nicole Krauss
It’s better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone… so far.
– Marilyn Monroe
And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.
– Nora Ephron
It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.
– Theodore Roosevelt
The thing everyone should realize is that the key to happiness is being happy by yourself and for yourself.
– Ellen Degeneres
You are never stronger than when you land on the other side of despair.
– Zadie Smith
You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
– Johnny Cash
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
– William Faulkner
She can’t say to herself that it is really over, even though anyone else would say it was over, since he has moved to another city, hasn’t been in touch with her in more than a year, and is married to another woman.
– Lydia Davis
Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.
– Nick Hornby
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—It’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
– Jack Kerouac
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
– Henry Miller
Caitlyn isn’t someone to get over. She’s someone to come to terms with, the way you have to come to terms with your parents, your siblings. You can’t deny they ever happened. You can’t deny you ever loved them, love them still, even if loving them causes you pain.
– Judy Blume
Hearts live by being wounded
– Oscar Wilde
There are no happy endings.
Endings are the saddest part.
So just give me a happy middle
And a very happy start.
– Shel Silverstein
