One of the saddest kinds of love is a secret love. Maybe you don’t have the courage to admit your feelings to the other person. Maybe the person you’ve fallen for already loves another.
Whichever the case, a secret love is both agony and torture. It is agony that you must hide your feelings, but delicious torture when you catch sight or engage in a conversation with your loved one.
We’ve curated these quotes just for you.
Love ceases to be a pleasure, when it ceases to be a secret. – Aphra Behn
Love is beautiful only when you are secretly loved by a stranger. – Mwanandeke Kindembo
He was both everything I could ever want.
And nothing I could ever have.
– Ranata Suzuki
It’s painful, loving someone from afar. Watching them – from the outside. The once familiar elements of their life reduced to nothing more than occasional mentions in conversations and faces changing in photographs… They exist to you now as nothing more than living proof that something can still hurt you … with no contact at all. – Ranata Suzuki
There’s so little love in the world, Julie. When it’s kept a secret, it’s wasted. – Eleanor Perry
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. – Pablo Neruda
Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us. – Carl Jung
Dying to know. Afraid to find out.
A secret love is beautiful, sweet and sacred when it’s just a light infatuation; but when that person reaches over and touches you in the heart, making it alive in a way it has never known, that secret love becomes frightening, because you can never make them love you, you would never want to make them love you…but all the same, no matter which way you view it, they don’t love you…and your heart doesn’t know how to beat the same. – Stefanie Schneider
I want to hold your hand but you won’t ever know.
I love you with all my life, but its not like you will ever know. – Amber Hope
Some relationships hurt but secret relationships hurt more than that where you don’t confess even to yourself that you’re in a relationship. – Gaurav S Kaintura
I can’t wait to see you again, even if just for a few moments… my heart skips a beat and I get a silly smile that takes over my face… maybe some day you will feel the same way too… – Karen Kostyla
I wish I could just ask what you think of me.
How flippantly we all treat a secret love, like a joke, something cute, as if it’s just a sweet little thing to pat. But when we are the secret lover, we hold our breath with each word they speak, we long so desperately for their touch, even just brief, we could almost bleed we long for it so. And when they find a lover, we feel like a shadow, longing to be seen as real, until we finally learn we have nothing more to do than to fade away from their light. – Stephanie Schneider
If you love someone, tell them. For hearts are often broken by words left unspoken. – Stephanie Roogle
Technically, I’m single. But my heart is taken by someone I can’t call my own.
I’m afraid to lose you but you’re not even mine.
If you cannot hold me in your arms, then hold my memory in high regard. And if I cannot be in your life, then at least let me live in your heart. – Ranata Suzuki
I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all. – Iris Murdoch
It’s a funny thing secret love. You would change yourself and your whole world just to be with them; just to hear them talk to you makes you feel as though you’re experiencing an epiphany. Just to see them look at you makes you feel as though every speck of what you are is valuable; and to watch them walk in the room, the ordinary, dark boring room and watch it change when they walk in as if they carry a piece of the sun itself in their being, as if now that they’ve arrived the whole world will be okay again. As if having them near would be the nearest thing to heaven you’ve ever known. But they don’t love you and they walk on by each time with a smile, a nod and vanish away from your hungry sight. – Stephanie Schneider
Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret. – Hermann Hesse
And when the light has long since gone …. I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go. – Ranata Suzuki
I wanted to tell you all my secrets, but you became one of them instead.
We are trapped by convention and must marry another. Every good child knows: duty before your heart’s desire. So in the shadows we remain. – Maddy Kobar, With a Reckless Abandon
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. – Maya Angelou
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves. – Federico Garcia Lorca
I think, a secret love is something none of your friends would understand. And it’s like a fairy tale, but more serious. – Yunho
Love should never be a secret. If you keep something as complicated as love stored up inside, it could make you sick. – Stan Lee
Beneath her Marks and Spencer jersey, her heart sometimes called him darling, and after two glasses of Liebfraumilch, lover. – Joanna Trollope, The Choir
We’ve all at some point in our life encountered that feeling of secretly liking someone, secretly having your eyes on them, secretly wishing they knew, but deep inside you were afraid of what the outcome would be. So you kept it unnoticed. Kept it hidden, locked inside, just hoping that maybe one day that moment would finally come when they would notice you! – Telisa McLaughlin
There are worse things than a broken heart. Like the love that you don’t explore. – Dawson’s Creek
When I told you I loved that song, you were meant to listen. – Joyce Rachelle
There is no secret left in the fact that I am madly in love with you. My happiness glows on my face and my smile gives it away. I have tried hard but now I can’t do that anymore. – Sheila Johns
To him, I’m just another girl. Sitting in class with my head on my desk. To me, he’s that guy. With that smile, those eyes, that laugh, and the boy I can never have
Love never grows when its secretly kept locked in our hearts. Love will only find its fulfillment when it finds it’s way out and dwells in the heart of that person destined to keep it.
It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication. – Charlotte Bronte
The most painful feeling is falling for somebody who is madly in love with a loved one in your life.
I have so much that I want to say to you, but I can’t say a word. – Michelle Burns
I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands. – Francesca Lia Block
You are Venus, and I am your Moon. I am the secret that you will never tell. The best secrets are the most bent. Forever your lover, never your man. – Rolf van der Wind
The extreme form of passionate love is secret love. – Japanese Proverb
It’s hard to admit when you have fallen in love with someone who can’t be yours.
Some of us will never know we’d owned someone’s heart for a season. – Joyce Rachelle
He wanted her. She’d never tell. Secretly she wanted him as well. – Avril Lavigne
The more I hide my feelings for you, the stronger they become.
I hid my love in field and town Till een the breeze would knock me down, The bees seemed singing ballads oer, The fly’s bass turned a lion’s roar; And even silence found a tongue, To haunt me all the summer long; The riddle nature could not prove Was nothing else but secret love. – John Clare
He is my secret. My beautiful secret.
In the bottom of my heart lies a secret which I have never told a soul in the world. There is an image of this person who is dearest to me and closer than anything else. – Avril Lavigne
I do not lack the courage to tell you how I feel. What I fear is how you will react to it. – Bram Stoker
One sweet, sad secret holds my heart in thrall; A mighty love within my breast has grown, Unseen, unspoken, and of no one known; And of my sweet, who gave it, least of all. – Felix Arvers
Dear Cupid, next time hit us both.
You can’t stop the feelings you have for someone. You can’t lie to yourself either. Your heart knows the truth all too well.
But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary. – Thomas Mann
I pretend to look around, but I was actually looking for you.
Sorry, boys. I already got my eyes on a guy who’s not interested.
I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand.
There is nothing better for the spirit or the body than a love affair. It elevates the thoughts and flattens the stomachs. – Barbara Howar
Better to live with the guilty secret than the open truth of their life together – that they were bound by the habit of illicit lust, mutual degradation. – Fay Weldon
The sun watches what I do, but the moon knows all my secrets. – J.M. Wonderland
When I walk into a room full of people, I always look for you first.
There is a name hidden in the shadow of my soul, where I read it night and day and no other eye sees it. – Alphonse De Lamartine
I was praying the someday, you would notice me and tell me that you love me like I pictured you would in my countless daydreams about us.