Friendship Quotes
A friend loves at all times, and kinsfolk are born to share adversity. - Proverbs 17:17
Some friends play at friendship, but a true friend sticks closer than one's nearest kin. - Proverbs 18:24
An honest answer is the sign of true friendship. - Proverbs 24:26
A friend means well, even when he hurts you. But when an enemy puts his hand round your shoulder - watch out! - Proverbs 27:6
Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe unto him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. - Ecclesiastes 4:9-10
Forsake not an old friend; for the new is not comparable to him: a new friend is as new wine; when it is old, thou shalt drink it with pleasure. - Ecclesiasticus 9:10 (Apocrypha)
The greatest love a person can have for his friends is to give his life for them. - John 15:13
"Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary - Louisa May Alcott
A faithful friend is the medicine of life. - Apocrypha
Friendship is the highest form of love for another human person, since it is totally without self-interest. It is a relationship that rejoices in the other person, without any requirement that the friend do something in return. The providing of entertainment or pleasure, or the gratifying of the desires or wants of the other is not a basic requirement for true friendship. True friends find joy simply in being with each other, and full joy in giving of themselves for each other. - Thomas Aquinas
Friendship is essentially a partnership. Also a friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend's existence, when given reality by relationship with him, makes us more fully aware of our own. - Aristotle
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. - Aristotle
Friendship is a spiritual relationship between two people, one that was based on love, leading each friend to work for the other's happiness. Friendship is an image of God's love for us since authentic, self-sacrificing friendship mirrors the love that Christ showed for us on the Cross, and which He described teaching that "no greater love can one have than to lay down one's life for one's friend" (John 15:13). Only true friendship, of everything that exists in the natural, created world, could lead one to God. - Augustine
A soulmate is someone who has the locks to fit our keys, and the keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we're pretending to be. Each of us unveils the best part of one another. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person were safe in our paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we're two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we've found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life. - Richard Bach
What is a friend? I will tell you. It is a person with whom you dare to be yourself - your soul can be naked with him - he seems to ask of you to put on nothing, only to be what you are. He does not want you to be better or worse. When you are with him, you feel as a prisoner feels who has just been declared innocent. You do not have to be on your guard. You can say what you think, so long as it is genuinely you. He understands those contradictions in your nature that lead others to misjudge you. With him you breathe freely. You can avow your little vanities and envies and hates and vicious sparks, your meannesses and absurdities and, in opening them up to him, they are lost, dissolved on the white ocean of his loyalty. He understands. You do not have to be careful. You can abuse him, neglect him, tolerate him. Best of all, you can keep still with him. It makes no matter. He likes you - he is like fire that purges to the bone. He understands. He understands. You can weep with him, sin with him, laugh with him, pray with him. Through it all - and underneath - he sees, knows and loves you. A friend? What is a friend? Just one, I repeat, with whom you dare to be yourself. - C. Raymond Beron
I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar. - Robert Brault
I could do without many things with no hardship - you are not one of them. - Ashleigh Brilliant
With a friend, we can be the person we want to be. The friend's acceptance affirms that self and allows us to develop it - Joyce Brothers
Friendship without self interest is one of the rare and beautiful things in life. - James Francis Byrnes
Friendship is Love without his wings! - George Gordon, Lord Byron
Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship. - George Gordon, Lord Byron
Give me one friend, just one, who meets the needs of all my varying moods. - Esther M. Clark
Friendship is a sheltering tree; - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends. - John Churton Collins
True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost - Charles Caleb Colton
A friend is someone you can be alone with and have nothing to do and not be able to think of anything to say and be comfortable in the silence. - Sheryl Condie
Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannot congeal in winter. - James Fenimore Cooper
What is a friend? I will tell you...it is someone with whom you dare to be yourself. - Frank Crane
Thank you friend. I never came to you, my friend, and went away without some new enrichment of the heart; More faith and less of doubt, more courage in the days ahead. And often in great need coming to you, I went away comforted indeed. How can I find the shining word, the glowing phrase that tells all that your love has meant to me, all that your friendship spells? There is no word, no phrase for you on whom I so depend. All I can say to you is this, God bless you precious friend. - Grace Noll Crowell
A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway. - Father Jerome Cummings
The real friendships among men are so rare that when they occur they are famous. - Clarence Day
My friends are my estate. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them. They tell me those who were poor early have different views of gold. I don't know how that is. God is not so wary as we, else He would give us no friends, lest we forget Him. - Emily Dickinson
It is the friends you can call at 4 a.m. that matter. - Marlene Dietrich
Friendship is not simply a "relationship", knowing someone, conversing with that person, or dealing with that person in business, school, or in casual acquaintance. True friendship is not just a "relationship", but self-sacrificing love. Friendship is a love that does not look for anything in return for the love given, and finds happiness in promoting the interests and happiness of the other. Such a love warms the heart, thrills the mind, and urges the friend to give everything for the other--just as Christ does for us--and leads to happiness in this world while pointing to God, who, Himself, is Love. - Rev. Stephen M. DiGiovanni
Friendship is held to be the severest test of character. It is easy, we think, to be loyal to a family and clan, whose blood is in your own veins. Love between a man and a woman is founded on the mating instinct and is not free from desire and self-seeking. But to have a friend and to be true under any and all trials is the mark of a person! - Charles Alexander Eastman
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence. - George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away. - George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
In the coldest February, as in every other month in every other year, the best thing to hold on to in this world is each other. - Linda Ellerbee
To act the part of a true friend requires more conscientious feeling than to fill with credit and complacency any other station or capacity in social life. - Sarah Ellis
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only the highest rank, that being allowed to speak the truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto ... Almost every man we meet requires some civility -- requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Friendship" Essays: First Series, 1841)
A friend is someone who will make us do what we can when we are saying we can't - Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us. - Epicurus (341 - 270 BC) Greek philosopher
One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives. - Euripides (408 B.C.)
I remember you and recall you without effort, without exercise of will; that is, by natural impulse, indicated by a sense of duty, or of obligation. And that, I take it, is the only sort of remembering worth the having. When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy -- that it is built upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them. - Douglas Fairbanks
My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me. - Henry Ford
Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing. - Benjamin Franklin
A brother may not be a friend, but a friend will always be a brother. - Benjamin Franklin
When all is said and done, friendship is the only trustworthy fabric of the affections. So-called love is a delirious inhuman state of mind: when hot it substitutes indulgence for fair play; when cold it is cruel, but friendship is warmth in cold, firm ground in a bog. - Miles Franklin
A good friend is my nearest relation. - Thomas Fuller (1732)
My friend is he who will tell me my faults in private. - Solomon Ibn Gabirol
...in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and the sharing of pleasures, for in the dew of little things, the heart finds its morning and is refreshed. - Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity. - Kahil Gibran
Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit. - Kahil Gibran
Friendship is to have the latchkey of another's mind. - Edgar Goodspeed
The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity. - Ulysses S. Grant
There is an electricity about a friendship relationship. We are both more relaxed and more sensitive, more creative and more reflective, more energetic and more casual, more excited and more serene. It is as though when we come in contact with our friend we enter into a different environment. - Andrew M. Greeley
A friend should be one in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and its sincerity. - Robert Hall
Friendship needs no words... - Dag Hammarskjold
The best mirror is an old friend. - George Herbert
Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
Two friends, two bodies with one soul inspired. - Homer
Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you. - Elbert Hubbard
But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to the benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine. - Thomas Jefferson
True friendship ought never to conceal what it thinks. - Saint Jerome
The friendship that can cease has never been real. - Saint Jerome
We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over. - Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)
Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world. - Erica Jong (Fear of Flying)
Plant a seed of friendship; reap a bouquet of happiness. - Lois L. Kaufman
In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us. - Francois duc de La Rochefoucauld
However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship. - Fran�ois, duc de La Rochefoucauld (Maximes, 1665)
Platonic friendship: the interval between the introduction and the first kiss. - Sophie Irene Loeb
A friend shelters us in the storms of life, aids our celebrations of life, hears us in our silence, revels in our festivity, holds us in our weakness, liberates our strengths, shares our grief, celebrates our happiness, hoards our confidences, mends our wounds, promotes our well being, bits us stay when we are lonely, makes every day a holiday, is quick with the truth, is slow to anger, forgives readily, forgets immediately, accepts us unconditionally, nurtures our growth, refines our talents, loves for our sake, is there when needed, is near when unneeded, keeps our most intimate thoughts, likes us when we are unlikeable, loves us when we are unlovable, is the first to accept us, is the last to reject us, builds bridges to us, never walls us off. Friends are extravagant gifts from God. - Charles D. Lumpkin (Friendship)
There is an important difference between love and friendship. While the former delights in extremes and opposites, the latter demands equality. - Fran�oise D'Aubegne Maintenon
I'm treating you as a friend asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future pluses - Katherine Mansfield
A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked. - Bernard Meltzer
We will win the world when we realize that fellowship, not evangelism, must be our primary emphasis. When we demonstrate the Big Miracle of Love, it won't be necessary for us to go out -- they will come in. - Jess Moody
A friendship that like love is warm; A love like friendship, steady. - Thomas Moore (How Shall I Woo?)
Love demands infinitely less than friendship. - George Jean Nathan
Too late we learn, a man must hold his friend, Unjudged, accepted, trusted to the end. - John Boyle O'Reilly
Let us embrace, and from this very moment vow an eternal misery together. - Thomas Otway (The Orphan, Act iv)
Friends are needed both for joy and for sorrow. - Samuel Paterson
A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeable. - William Penn
Whoever says that Friendship is easy has obviously never had a friend! - Bronwyn Polson
Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend. - Alexander Pope (Essay on Man IV)
True friendship is never serene. - Marie De Rabutin-Chantal
Real friends are those who, when you've made a fool of yourself, don't feel that you've done a permanent job. - Erwin T. Randall
A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words. - Donna Roberts
Friend is a word of royal tone; friend is a poem all alone. - Safari
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so you learn to love God and man by loving. Begin as a mere apprentice, and the very power of love will lead you on to become a master of the art. - St. Francis de Sales
Good friends are good for your health. - Irwin Sarason
You can't eat your friends and have them too. - Budd Schulberg
Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light. - Albert Schweitzer
I count myself in nothing else so happy, as in a soul remembering my good friends. - William Shakespeare
Close friendship never requires us to convert our innocent love for one another, to the reasoned affection of the adult world. It is mysterious spirituality over reasonable spirituality, informality over formality, joy over proper behavior. - L. David Sterling, (Letters to Laura - 1998)
True friendship is the intertwining of spirits, so that the joy of one becomes the joy of the other, as the insufficiency of one is filled by the abundance of the other. - L. David Sterling, (Letters to Laura - 1998)
A friend is a gift you give yourself. - Robert Louis Stevenson
Join the company of lions rather than assume the lead among foxes. - The Talmud
Those who forgets their friends to follow those of a higher status are truly snobs. - William M. Thackeray
It is not what you give your friend, but what you are willing to give him that determines the quality of friendship. - Mary Dixon Thayer
A true friendship is as wise as it is tender - Henry David Thoreau
I wish by the behavior of my friend toward me to be led to have such regard for myself as for a box of precious ointment. I shall not be so cheap to myself if I see that another values me. - Henry David Thoreau (Journal, 25 March, 1842)
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with. - Mark Twain
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. - Alice Walker
True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation. - George Washington
For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation. - Simon Weil
A true friend is someone who is there for you when he'd rather be anywhere else. - Len Wein
All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand. - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality. - Woodrow Wilson
A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out. - Walter Winchell
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