Friendship Quotes

Friendship quotes by notable authors are great reminders of the value of friendship. Quotes like these, friends like these, bring the careful observations about friendships for our consideration and help us contemplate our relationships with friends.

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

What is a friend? One soul inhabiting two bodies. –Aristotle

A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. -Francis Bacon

A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous. -Ambrose Bierce

Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache; do be my enemy, for friendship’s sake. –William Blake

Women's friendships are some of the most intense relationships in the universe—both in terms of their positive, supportive aspects as well as their negative, problematic characteristics. -Joy Carol

Friendship makes prosperity brighter, while it lightens adversity by sharing its grieves and anxieties. –Cicero

When friendship disappears then there is a space left open o that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.
–Hilaire Belloc

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. –Dale Carnegie

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude—roots that can be pulled up. -George Eliot

One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives. -Euripides

There is a scarcity of friendship, but not of friends. -Thomas Fuller

True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable. -David Tyson Gentry

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves. -Oliver Goldsmith

There is a curious fact about friendship that we have always known but rarely acknowledge: by understanding others, we also come closer to understanding ourselves. -Bradley Trevor Greive

Friendship is probably the purest form of selecting our own propaganda. Relationships with similar others helps us feel OK about who we are. -Em Griffin

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

Some of the best friendship are born of unusual circumstances or in curious settings. So, keep your guard down and your friendship antennae up—you never know where and when a potential friend may be found. -Roger Horchow

True friendship ought never to conceal what it thinks. -St. Jerome

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance. -Samuel Johnson

Plant a seed of friendship; reap a bouquet of happiness.
-Lois L. Kaufman

Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which increases with the setting sun of life. -La Fontaine

Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or to keep one.
-Robert E. Lee

I don't like that man. I'm going to have to get to know him better.
-Abraham Lincoln

The richer your friends, the more they will cost you. -Marbury

The best friendships are built up, like a fine lacquer finish, with the accumulated layers of many acts of kindness. -Alan Loy McGinnis

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. -Friedrich Nietzsche

As the yellow gold is tried in fire, so the faith of friendship must be seen in adversity. -Ovid

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures. -William Penn

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes. -Proverb

Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world. -Eleanor Roosevelt

Marriage must exemplify friendship's highest ideal, or else it will be a failure. -Margaret E. Sangster

Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

Friendship is constant in all other things, save in the office and affairs of love. -Shakespeare

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

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
-Henry David Thoreau

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

I have lost friends, some by death...others through sheer inability to cross the street. -Virginia Woolf

The very act of becoming friends may send someone with intimacy problems into an emotional tailspin, changing those involved as well as their behavior toward each other. -Jan Yager

If you are thinking about ways to maintain your friendship, create a new one, or end a complicated relationship with your long time friend, hopefully these friendship quotes have given you certainty of the huge importance of having a true friendship.

Tony Robbins on Friendship

"My definition for friendship is quite simple: if you're a friend, then you absolutely love a person unconditionally, and you'll do anything you can to support them. If they call you when they're in trouble or truly in need, you're there for them. Months go by, yet the friendship would never weaken once you decide that somebody is truly your friend. That's it! You never question it again. I think I have lots of friends because my rules for friendship are so easy to meet! All you have to do is care about me and love me, and I'll care about you and love you, and now we're friends."

Anthony Robbins: Awaken the Giant Within

Friends Going Separate Ways Quotes

The band never actually split up—we just stopped speaking to each other and went our own separate ways.
Boy George

When teenagers split up, it’s like two strips of Velcro® separating. They make an interesting noise, no real harm’s done, and their function is kept intact.
Marion Kaplinsky

One of the best things about high school is all the great friends that you’ve made. Whether cramming all night for an exam, planning a senior prank, or stressing out about college applications, your friends were there to make the bad times better and the good times great. If you have two close friends or if you have twenty, you are a better person because of them. You probably spent lots of time with them this year, especially those buddies who you won’t see as much after graduation. Yes, you may be going separate ways, but that doesn’t have to mean the end of the friendship. It’s a big adjustment to make, going from seeing your friends every day to only seeing them every other week, every few months, or once a year, but it makes the time you do spend together more special: You’ll spend hours catching up, talking about everything and nothing.
Mitchell Uscher: Class of 2004

The poets grasped each other’s hands with a rush of melancholy and tender feeling inexpressible in words, and went their separate ways.
Honoré de Balzac: A Distinguished Provincial at Paris.

It is one thing to go your separate way, leaving friends and comrades behind peace and prosperity; it is another thing to fail to remember them when the world is casting them out.
Mary Antin in Common Ground, Spring 1941

The trees that grow on the mountain
All go their separate ways.
Some are born to be carved into saints,
Some as charcoal end their days.
Spanish rhyme

The end has come, as come it must
To all things; in these sweet June days
The teacher and the scholar trust
Their parting feet to separate ways.
John Greenleaf Whittier

Related category: friendship quotes

Baltasar Gracián on Friends and Friendship

Baltasar Gracián Quotes

Let friendly intercourse be a school of knowledge, and culture be taught through conversation: thus you make your friends your teachers and mingle the pleasures of conversation with the advantages of instruction.

Those make friends who do friendly acts.

It is not enough for a careful man not to interfere with others, he must see that they do not interfere with him. One is not obliged to belong so much to all as not to belong at all to oneself. So with friends, their help should not be abused or more demanded from them than they themselves will grant.

Many persons omit the à propos because it does not occur to them; a friend's advice on such occasions may enable them to see the advantages. It is one of the greatest gifts of mind to be able to offer what is needed at the moment: for want of that many things fail to be performed.

It is a great art to agree with others. The alternation of contraries beautifies and sustains the world: if it can cause harmony in the physical world, still more can it do so in the moral. Adopt this policy in the choice of friends and defendants.

Have Friends: it is a second existence. Every friend is good and wise for his friend: among them all everything turns to good. Every one is as others wish him; that they may wish him well, he must win their hearts and so their tongues. There is no magic like a good turn, and the way to gain friendly feelings is to do friendly acts. The most and best of us depend on others; we have to live either among friends or among enemies. Seek some one every day to be a well-wisher if not a friend; by and by after trial some of these will become intimate.

It is both wiser and easier to collect winter stores in summer. In prosperity favours are cheap and friends are many. It is well therefore to keep them for more unlucky days, for adversity costs dear and has no helpers. Retain a store of friendly and obliged persons; the day may come when their price will go up. Low minds never have friends; in luck they will not recognise them: in misfortune they will not be recognised by them.

Only act with Honourable Men: you can trust them and them you. Their honour is the best surety of their behaviour even in misunderstandings, for they always act having regard to what they are. Hence it is better to have a dispute with honourable people than to have a victory over dishonourable ones. You cannot treat with the ruined, for they have no hostages for rectitude. With them there is no true friendship, and their agreements are not binding, however stringent they may appear, because they have no feeling of honour. Never have to do with such men, for if honour does not restrain a man, virtue will not, since honour is the throne of rectitude.

You should keep your desires sealed up, still more your defects. All go wrong sometimes, but the wise try to hide the errors, but fools boast of them. Reputation depends more on what is hidden than on what is done; if a man does not live chastely, he must live cautiously. The errors of great men are like the eclipses of the greater lights. Even in friendship it is rare to expose one's failings to one's friend. Nay, one should conceal them from oneself if one can. But here one can help with that other great rule of life: learn to forget.

By complaining of past offences we give occasion for future ones, and in seeking aid or counsel we only obtain indifference or contempt. It is much more polite to praise one man's favours, so that others may feel obliged to follow suit. To recount the favours we owe the absent is to demand similar ones from the present, and thus we sell our credit with the one to the other. The shrewd will therefore never publish to the world his failures or his defects, but only those marks of consideration which serve to keep friendship alive and enmity silent.

He that was all in all to himself carried all with him when he carried himself. If a universal friend can represent to us Rome and the rest of the world, let a man be his own universal friend, and then he is in a position to live alone.

None is so perfect that he does not need at times the advice of others. He is an incorrigible ass who will never listen to any one. Even the most surpassing intellect should find a place for friendly counsel. Sovereignty itself must learn to lean. There are some that are incorrigible simply because they are inaccessible: they fall to ruin because none dares to extricate them. The highest should have the door open for friendship; it may prove the gate of help.

A friend must be free to advise, and even to upbraid, without feeling embarrassed. Our satisfaction in him and our trust in his steadfast faith give him that power. One need not pay respect or give credit to every one, but in the innermost of his precaution man has a true mirror of a confidant to whom he owes the correction of his errors, and has to thank for it.

Select your Friends: Only after passing the matriculation of experience and the examination of fortune will they be graduates not alone in affection but in discernment. Though this is the most important thing in life, it is the one least cared for. Intelligence brings friends to some, chance to most. Yet a man is judged by his friends, for there was never agreement between wise men and fools. At the same time, to find pleasure in a man's society is no proof of near friendship: it may come from the pleasantness of his company more than from trust in his capacity.

There are some friendships legitimate, others illicit; the latter for pleasure, the former for their fecundity of ideas and motives. Few are the friends of a man's self, most those of his circumstances. The insight of a true friend is more useful than the goodwill of others: therefore gain them by choice, not by chance. A wise friend wards off worries, a foolish one brings them about. But do not wish them too much luck, or you may lose them.


Baltasar Gracián (1601 – 1658)
The Art of Worldly Wisdom Friendship Quotes

Friendship in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendship seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready made from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer's way. His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt the bond that united him to Mr. Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman, the well known man about town. It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in each other, or what subject they could find in common. It was reported by those who encountered them in their Sunday walks, that they said nothing, looked singularly dull and would hail with obvious relief the appearance of a friend.

--

I do not blame our old friend, Jekyll wrote, but I share his view that we must never meet. I mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion; you must not be surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut even to you. You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning; and you can do but one thing, Utterson, to lighten this destiny, and that is to respect my silence. Utterson was amazed; the dark influence of Hyde had been withdrawn, the doctor had returned to his old tasks and amities; a week ago, the prospect had smiled with every promise of a cheerful and an honoured age; and now in a moment, friendship, and peace of mind, and the whole tenor of his life were wrecked.

--

Dear Lanyon, You are one of my oldest friends; and although we may have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot remember, at least on my side, any break in our affection. There was never a day when, if you had said to me, 'Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason, depend upon you,' I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail me tonight, I am lost. You might suppose, after this preface, that I am going to ask you for something dishonourable to grant. Judge for yourself.

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde(1886)

Best Friend Quotes | What Is a Friend?

By Notebookbabies

Friendship Quotes by Anonymous

Random friendship quotes:

Friendship is possible only because people do not say to your face the things they say behind your back.

Friendship is like a bank account: you cannot continue to draw on it without making deposits.

The best way to keep friendships from breaking is not to drop them.

No one can ruin friendships as fast as the person who says things even before he has thought of them.

Best Friend Quotes | Friendship Quotes by The French

Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones.

Montesquieu


The pleasure found in friendship as in love comes more from the things we don't know about others than from the things we know.

La Rochefoucauld


Women give nothing to friendship except what they borrow from love.

Chamfort

On Friendship by Khalil Gibran

"Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the ‘nay’ in your own mind, nor do you withhold the ‘ay.’
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;
For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is un-acclaimed.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
And 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.

When you meet your friend on the roadside or in the market place, let the spirit in you move your lips and direct your tongue.
Let the voice within your voice speak to the ear of his ear;
For his soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered."

Khalil Gibran: The Prophet (1923)

Friendship is Disinterested Commerce

Friendship is disinterested commerce between equals; love, an object intercourse between tyrants and slaves.

Oliver Goldsmith

Relation of Estrangement in Friendships

"These friendships were not just easy relations of complicity and likemindedness, but brought both parties face to face with that which exceeds them. To be a friend is to cease to be what one is. It is a relation of estrangement. Only in the eyes of the Other do I exceed my existence as an isolated being. This holds not only for the actuality of friendship, but especially for the exigency of writing."

Ullrich Haase and William Large: Maurice Blanchot (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

A Friend That Will Go to Jail for Me

There is nothing upon the face of the earth so insipid as a medium. Give me love or hate! A friend that will go to jail for me, or an enemy that will run me through the body!

Fanny Burney: Camilla (1796)
Best Friend Quotes

Laughter and the Love of Friends

From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.

Hilaire Belloc: Dedicatory Ode
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If You Have a Friend

"I wonder if you have a friend with whom you talk, with whom
you expose your own feelings, your own concepts, your ideas and
disillusionment and so on. If you have such a friend, and I hope
you have, if you have such a friend with whom you are discussing,
you are talking over together, neither one nor the other is trying to
persuade the other, persuade, guide, or shape his particular thought.
So if you are willing, we are going to talk over together in that
manner, exploring, enquiring, never accepting what another says,
never expressing one's own strong opinions, but rather without any
bias, in great friendship, which means with great affection
respecting each other, without any arriere pensee, that is, having
some kind of hidden thought, hidden motive."

Krishnamurti: Mind Without Measure

I Was Angry with My Friend

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

William Blake: Songs of Experience (1794) ‘A Poison Tree’
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Best Friend Quotes | To Find a Friend

To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him—two.

Norman Douglas: Almanac (1941)

When Best Friend Abandons You Temporally

In the third grade you
were best friends with
another girl for six months.
Wow, I hated you for that.

Lorraine Bodger: 500 Reasons Why You're My Best Friend (2003)
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Separate Ways Quote

See also Friends Going Separate Ways Quotes.

Unexpectedly Jerry spoke. "Do you like him? Tony? You two get along?"
"I do like him," Denise said. "Thank goodness. I was scared enough
to meet him. Do you have a best friend from childhood?"
"I guess," Jerry said, color rising in his fat, smooth cheeks. "But we
kind of went our separate ways."
"My best friend," said Denise, "when we got to junior high school, she
got kind of fast. Do you want another soda?"

Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge: Fiction (2008)