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That gut-wrenching feeling of being unloved is caused by being left out, broken up with, or pushed away by the people you love. Unloving treatment can leave you feeling so useless, lonely, and unwanted.
You are not alone, as these sad quotes about when someone makes you feel unwanted will show you.
It's normal to feel unwanted at times, but you don’t have to give people the power to make you feel unloved. If someone is treating you poorly, know that there are people out there who will treat you better.
Whatever it is that’s making you feel lonely or unloved, know that you are, and have always been, strong enough to get through it.
We found these quotes about feeling unloved for when someone makes you feel unwanted to give you hope.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, my friend.
1. “Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.”― Vanessa Diffenbaugh
2. “But you can vanquish the demons only when you yourself are convinced of your own worth.”― Adeline Yen Mah
3. “We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked, and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.” ― Mother Teresa
4. “If you feel unwanted or unappreciated where you are or by those you're with, it only means you're in the wrong place or with the wrong people. Hang in there. Someone else will see you for the true gift you are.”― LK Hunsaker
5. "Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle." — Napoleon Hill
6. “I want to remind you that I love you, and that love is unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. If you feel unworthy or unwanted in any way… know that every breath you take is precious to me.”― Jamie McGuire
7. “Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”― G.K. Chesterton
8. “There's beauty in misery, sadness and things that are so unloved and forgotten.”― Ghaleya Aldhafiri
9. “I am not afraid of being unloved. But I am terrified of never learning to love.”― Michael D. O'Brien
10. "Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go." — Hermann Hesse
11. “You were never created to be hurt or scared or unloved. You were created for a life of joy, and fun, and love, where you can dream big dreams and have grand adventures.”― Jade Miller
12. “Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable….” ― Preston Sprinkle
13. “Books have always been my solace and my friend. Who can ever feel unloved or lonely when there’s a whole world of undiscovered journeys to take, hidden in the pages of a book.”― E.S. Carter
14. “We all choose to receive love and joy at the level of our self-love and self-esteem. So love yourself a little harder and life will get a lot better.” — Karen Salmansohn
15. “Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.” — Rupi Kaur
16. “You are good enough. You have always been good enough. You just have been too good to the wrong people.”
17. “It is sad to love and be unloved, but sadder still to be unable to love.”― Maurice Maeterlinck
18. “We all feel that we have things inside us that would make us unlovable if only people knew.”― David Smail
19. “Many people feel they don't have enough love. Feel unloved. Many people do not understand that the essence of love is giving and not demanding.”― Titon Rahmawan
20. “One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to love someone. If you're feeling unloved and you want to feel better, go love someone, and see what happens.” ― Dossie Easton
21. “You can’t make someone love a person. But the opposite is also true. Nothing can make someone unlove a person, either.”― Vi Keeland
22. “Your value does not decrease based on someone's inability to see your worth.”
23. “Just because someone isn’t willing or able to love us, it doesn’t mean that we are unlovable.”― Brené Brown
24. "Sometimes she feels unloved. Sometimes she feels she will never gain approval from those people who are most important to her. But she’s brave and good-hearted and faces her life head-on.”― Sophie Kinsella
25. "Remember you were born of love, you are love, it exists inside you, that's where it begins. When you know this you will have a happier life. ” ― Angie Karan
26. “I feel profoundly alone, cut off, unattractive…I feel unloveable. But I respect that unloveable soldier—struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honourable. I respect myself.”― Susan Sontag
27. “And when the burning inside your chest claws, insults you as forgotten, hideous, unloved every single night, you learn how to create iron, then a sword, and challenge those demons to a fight.”― Nikita Gill
28. “We were perhaps not so unlovable as we had come to believe.”― George Saunders
29. “But what attracted me to weeds was not their beauty, but their resilience. I mean, despite being so widely despised, so unloved, killed with every chance we get, they are so pervasive, so seemingly invincible.”― Carol Vorvain
30. “I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet also to find the courage to go forward in life.” — Tim O’Brien
31. “We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.”― John Ortberg
32. “You cannot feel unloved when you love others. Love is something you do."— Anonymous
33. “What you don't give, you lose. If you don't have it, give it away to somebody today. Protect and keep the things you value by giving them.”― Dragos Bratasanu
34. “I can say this: don’t give up. Not on love but, more important still, not on you. Never let yourself believe that you are unlovable or flawed in any way. You deserve to be loved. You deserve kind words and an unwavering eye.”― Menna van Praag
35. "Someday someone won’t be afraid of how much you love. They won’t stay on the shores; they’ll meet you in the depths."
36. “Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.”― Sigmund Freud
37. “So often, we don’t see the beauty in ourselves. If we keep observing our reflection in the distorted mirrors of bad relationships, we start believing we are ugly and unlovable. And the flaws aren’t in how we look, but in whose eyes we’re seeing ourselves through.”― Jacqueline Simon Gunn
38. “You were created to be loved. So for you to live as if you were unloved is a limitation, not the other way around.”― Wm. Paul Young
39. “Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn't change the heart of others — it only changes yours.”― Shannon Alder
40. "Be the love you never received." — Rune Cazuli
41. “Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.”― Bernard Branson
42. "A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.”― Thomas Mann
43. “Rejection, though — it could make the loss of someone you weren't even that crazy about feel gut-wrenching and world ending.”― Deb Caletti
44. “Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.”― Steve Maraboli
45. "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." — Ernest Hemingway
46. “When you can’t reach the standards of another’s heart you must ask yourself, "What value do I put on my soul that I would subject myself to such rejection?”― Shannon Alder
47. “It’s common to reject or punish yourself when you’ve been rejected by others. When you experience disappointment from the way your family or others treat you, that’s the time to take special care of yourself. What are you doing to nurture yourself? What are you doing to protect yourself? Find a healthy way to express your pain.”― Christina Enevoldsen
48. "Let the hurt open you instead of closing you. Let the hurt send you looking for those who will accept you instead of hiding from those who reject you.”― Bryant McGill
49. “Rejection steals the best of who I am by reinforcing the worst of what’s been said to me.”― Lysa TerKeurst
50. “I am a museum full of art but you had your eyes shut” — Rupi Kaur
51. “If you show someone the sun in your bones and they reject you you must remember. they hurt themselves this very same way. – unable”― Nayyirah Waheed
52. “'It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,' the passage goes, 'but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable.'”― Gabrielle Zevin
53. “When we’re hungry, we eat food. When we’re out of shape, we go to the gym. When we’re tired, we go to sleep. But for some reason, when we’re feeling unlovable, we analyze ourselves to death until we feel worse.”― Jackson MacKenzie
54. “Today I am willing to love the unlovable parts of me with care.”― Galitta Tassa
55. “The voice in her head said: Imperfect, unlovable, victim, defeated, hide. The voice in her heart said: Kind, peaceful, gentle soul, easy to love, winner. Release the insecurities and reclaim your heart, your purpose, your peace.”― J. Autherine
56. “You recognize that no one who sucks your energy, puts you down, makes you feel small, or is unloving to you is entitled to your time.”― Cleo Wade
57. “The only person that deserves a special place in your life is someone that never made you feel like you were an option in theirs.”― Shannon L. Alder
58. “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”—Ayn Rand
59. “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”― F. Scott Fitzgerald
60. “When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”― Elizabeth Gilbert
61. “If you learn to really sit with loneliness and embrace it for the gift that it is…an opportunity to get to know YOU, to learn how strong you really are, to depend on no one but YOU for your happiness…you will realize that a little loneliness goes a LONG way in creating a richer, deeper, more vibrant and colorful YOU.”― Mandy Hale
62. “Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.”― Rumi
63. “Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it know yourself... know what you want.”― Janet Fitch
64. "It's never loneliness that nibbles away at a person's insides, but not having room inside themselves to be comfortably alone.”― Rachel Sontag
65. “There might be some hours of loneliness. But there was something wonderful even in loneliness. At least you belonged to yourself when you were lonely.”― Lucy Maud Montgomery
66. “If you don't like the scene you're in, if you're unhappy, if you're lonely, if you don't feel that things are happening, change your scene. Paint a new backdrop.”― Leo Buscaglia
67. “I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.”― Warsan Shire
68. “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of true romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. this is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness”― William S. Burroughs
69. “Even in the loneliest moments I have been there for myself.”― Sanober Khan
70. “A season of loneliness and isolation is when the caterpillar gets its wings. Remember that next time you feel alone.”― Mandy Hale
71. “So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?”― Olivia Laing
72. “I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your being.”― Hafez
73. “You will be lonely, but you'll become strong.”― Marie Rutkoski
74. “She was beautiful, in the quiet way that lonely, unnoticed people are beautiful to those who notice them.”― Jedediah Berry
75. “I don't want anyone who doesn't want me.”― Oprah Winfrey
If you are struggling with depression, you can reach the NAMI helpline by phone 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or email info@nami.org to learn more about mental health resources. If you feel you are at risk for suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
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Abby Jamison is an editorial intern who loves reading and writing above all else, but road trips are a close second. She finds most of her inspiration from feminism, LGBTQ+ history, and travel.