Friendship Quotes

"A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same."

"Don't walk behind me I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."

"An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind."

"Friendship... is not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything."

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand."

"In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit."

"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."

"One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood."

"A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down."

"A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world."

"A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely."

"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."

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence."

"Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends."

"The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares."

"True friends stab you in the front."

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."

"A true friend freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably."

"A friend to all is a friend to none."

"Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies."

"But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine."

"Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light."

"Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go."

"I cannot even imagine where I would be today were it not for that handful of friends who have given me a heart full of joy. Let's face it, friends make life a lot more fun."

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"

"In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed."

"Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness."

"Never explain - your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway."

"It is only the great hearted who can be true friends. The mean and cowardly, Can never know what true friendship means."

"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."

"A hug is like a boomerang - you get it back right away."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"A true friend is someone who is there for you when he'd rather be anywhere else."

"So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good."

"Be true to your work, your word, and your friend."

"There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship."

"Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer."

"When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character."

"The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you."

"A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship."

"The language of friendship is not words but meanings."

"An excellent man he has no enemies and none of his friends like him."

"Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces."

"It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them."

"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter."

"The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend."

"I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world."

"You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job."

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."

"A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends."

"Love is blind friendship closes its eyes."

"A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."

"If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue."

"True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance."

"Never make friends with people who are above or below you in status. Such friendships will never give you any happiness."

"The world is round so that friendship may encircle it."

"What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies."

"Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing."

"He who hath many friends hath none."

"There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first when you learn to live for others, they will live for you."

"Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts."

"Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend."

"Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly."

"Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit."

"A friend is one who walks in when others walk out."

"Never contract friendship with a man that is not better than thyself."

"The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights."

"There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth."

"She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

"Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend."

"Friendship and money: oil and water."

"A true friend is one who overlooks your failures and tolerates your success!"

"If you have one true friend you have more than your share."

"A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire."

"We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence."

"A quarrel between friends, when made up, adds a new tie to friendship."

"Lovers have a right to betray you... friends don't."

"No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow."

"I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing."

"Friendship is one mind in two bodies."

"A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend."

"It takes a long time to grow an old friend."

"If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give."

"Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil."

"But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold."

"Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."

"Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends."

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."

"Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness."

"A friend is, as it were, a second self."

"I have learned that to be with those I like is enough."

"Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends."

"The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship."

"As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend."

"It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not."

"Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend."

"Never have a companion that casts you in the shade."

"The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?"

"Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief."

"Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them."

"Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart."

"Life has no blessing like a prudent friend."

"Love demands infinitely less than friendship."

"Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference."

"Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth."

"All you need to do to be my friend is like me."

"Friends are born, not made."

"Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other."

"There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise."

"One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human."

"It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it."

"When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it."

"Instead of loving your enemies - treat your friends a little better."

"Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends."

"That friendship will not continue to the end which is begun for an end."

"Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable."

"We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone."

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."

"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."

"Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses."

"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."

"Friendship often ends in love but love in friendship - never."

"True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune to keep him is a blessing."

"Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it."

"Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world."

"Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?"

"Eros will have naked bodies Friendship naked personalities."

"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations entangling alliances with none."

"True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity, before it is entitled to the appellation."

"A friendship that like love is warm A love like friendship, steady."

"True friendship ought never to conceal what it thinks."

"A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy."

"Love is a friendship set to music."

"The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don't need any fingers."

"All lasting business is built on friendship."

"Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which increases with the setting sun of life."

"Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed."

"Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves."

"The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love."

"Friendship is essentially a partnership."

"Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship."

"A tree is known by its fruit a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love."

"False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports."

"I had three chairs in my house one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."

"I think it's important to have closure in any relationship that ends - from a romantic relationship to a friendship. You should always have a sense of clarity at the end and know why it began and why it ended. You need that in your life to move cleanly into your next phase."

"Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation."

"Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance."

"Friendship, like credit, is highest when it is not used."

"The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words."

"How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."

"It may happen sometimes that a long debate becomes the cause of a longer friendship. Commonly, those who dispute with one another at last agree."

"Friendship is two-sided. It isn't a friend just because someone's doing something nice for you. That's a nice person. There's friendship when you do for each other. It's like marriage - it's two-sided."

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."

"There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man."

"There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child."

"The essence of true friendship is to make allowance for another's little lapses."

"The Bush Administration's failure to be consistently involved in helping Israel achieve peace with the Palestinians has been both wrong for our friendship with Israel, as well as badly damaging to our standing in the Arab world."

"What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?"

"Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce."

"Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing."

"It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship."

"True friendship is like sound health the value of it is seldom known until it is lost."

"What sweetness is left in life, if you take away friendship? Robbing life of friendship is like robbing the world of the sun. A true friend is more to be esteemed than kinsfolk."

"Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends."

"Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police."

"If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love."

"However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship."

"What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love."

"Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become."

"Friendship is Love without his wings!"

"Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious."

"I have a loyalty that runs in my bloodstream, when I lock into someone or something, you can't get me away from it because I commit that thoroughly. That's in friendship, that's a deal, that's a commitment. Don't give me paper - I can get the same lawyer who drew it up to break it. But if you shake my hand, that's for life."

"Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship and pass the rosy wine."

"Loyalty and friendship, which is to me the same, created all the wealth that I've ever thought I'd have."

"People come in and out of our lives, and the true test of friendship is whether you can pick back up right where you left off the last time you saw each other."

"Sympathy constitutes friendship but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole."

"If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship."

"Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something."

"In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge."

"Opposition is true friendship."

"Friendship is like money, easier made than kept."

"Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!"

"Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship."

"Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions."

"Love is friendship set on fire."

"True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions."

"Caring for but never trying to own may be a further way to define friendship."

"If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair."

"The fact is, with every friendship you make, and every bond of trust you establish, you are shaping the image of America projected to the rest of the world. That is so important. So when you study abroad, you're actually helping to make America stronger."

"No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth."

"My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way."

"Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom."

"If one of two lovers is loyal, and the other jealous and false, how may their friendship last, for Love is slain!"

"There is a scarcity of friendship, but not of friends."

"No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground."

"To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind."

"The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover."

"The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef love, like being enlivened with champagne."

"Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming."

"Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does."

"Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl."

"I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans because I am by instinct a teacher, and I would like to teach them something."

"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim."

"The friendship that can cease has never been real."

"Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected."

"All those who offer an opinion on any doubtful point should first clear their minds of every sentiment of dislike, friendship, anger or pity."

"General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be."

"Moral science is better occupied when treating of friendship than of justice."

"But it all comes down to friendship, treating people right."

"Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy."

"It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat. It is a philosophical animal... one that does not place its affections thoughtlessly."

"Friendship has its illusions no less than love."

"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another people are friends in spots."

"I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being."

"When two people first meet, they can only have a very ordinary kind of friendship. But when you begin to understand each other, when you get close to them, you discover that you're suddenly eager to know him or her even better."

"There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love."

"She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them."

"All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand."

"One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error."

"Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things."

"For prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God."

"Friendship is a sheltering tree."

"I love life in spite of all that mars it. I love friendship, jokes and laughter."

"It must be remembered that the sea is a great breeder of friendship. Two men who have known each other for twenty years find that twenty days at sea bring them nearer than ever they were before, or else estrange them."

"Value your friendship. Value your relationships."

"Friendship, of itself a holy tie, is made more sacred by adversity."

"Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise."

"As told in Friendship with God, if we simply decided to believe and act as if first, we're all one, and second, life is eternal, it would render virtually everything we've done all our lives pointless."

"I think in friendship, you want to be there for your friend, and sometimes you just don't know what to do or the relationship you have with them is not clear enough for you to know what to do."

"Show me a genuine case of platonic friendship, and I shall show you two old or homely faces."

"Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation."

"I think the way to keep a friendship is to respect that everybody is different."

"Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded."

"It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship."

"Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation."

"When the world is so complicated, the simple gift of friendship is within all of our hands."

"If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own."

"Friendship always benefits love sometimes injures."

"Friendship is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies."

"The rare few, who, early in life have rid themselves of the friendship of the many."

"Friendship's the wine of life: but friendship new... is neither strong nor pure."

"Time makes friendship stronger, but love weaker."

"Love and friendship exclude each other."

"Happiness is understanding that friendship is more precious than mere things, more precious than getting your own way, more precious than being in situations where true principles are not at stake."

"A lot of the powerful religious leaders, from Jesus to Buddha to Tibetan monks, they're really talking about the same things: love and acceptable, and the value of friendship, and respecting yourself so you can respect others."

"Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life."

"Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy."

"Love is like the wild rose-briar Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?"

"A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow."

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, What! You too? I thought I was the only one."

"A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out."

"The only way to have a friend is to be one."

"In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures."

"True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable."

"A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself."

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature."

"Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down."

"Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It is not something you learn in school. But if you have not learned the meaning of friendship, you really have not learned anything."

"A sweet friendship refreshes the soul."

"The greatest gift of life is friendship, and I have received it."

"Friends are the family you choose."

"Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity."

"I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives."

"It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help."

"Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant."

"Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit."