Quotations about Friendship

A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be. --Douglas Pagels

Friendship isn't a big thing - it's a million little things. --Author Unknown

A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world. --Leo Buscaglia

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty. --Sicilian Proverb

The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend. --Aristotle

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. --Albert Schweitzer

A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they're not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they're not so bad. --Arnold H. Glasgow

The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you. --Elbert Hubbard, The Notebook, 1927

A good friend is cheaper than therapy. --Author Unknown

If 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. --Edgar Watson Howe

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend. --Henry David Thoreau

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

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
--William Shakespeare

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart. --Elisabeth Foley

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend. --William Blake

A friend is the only person you will let into the house when you are Turning Out Drawers. --Pam Brown

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

A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails. --Donna Roberts

If I had to sum up Friendship in one word, it would be Comfort. --Terri Guillemets

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone.  A man should keep his friendships in constant repair. --Samuel Johnson

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

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. --Laurence J. Peter

Friends are those rare people who ask how you are and then wait for the answer. --Author Unknown

A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out. --Grace Pulpit

One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one. --D.H. Lawrence

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. --C.S. Lewis

Constant use will not wear ragged the fabric of friendship. --Dorothy Parker

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. --Virginia Woolf

There are big ships and small ships.  But the best ship of all is friendship. --Author Unknown

The best kind of friend is the one you could sit on a porch with, never saying a word, and walk away feeling like that was the best conversation you've had. --Author Unknown

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

A true friend is one who thinks you are a good egg even if you are half-cracked. --Author Unknown

Friends are kisses blown to us by angels. --Author Unknown

It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to the friendship that we are not. --Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter. --Marlene Dietrich

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. --Toni Morrison, Beloved

Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love. --Letty Cottin Pogrebin

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

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. --George MacDonald

A real friend is someone who would feel loss if you jumped on a train, or in front of one. --Author Unknown

Silences make the real conversations between friends.  Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts. --Margaret Lee Runbeck, Answer Without Ceasing

Love is like the wild-rose briar;
Friendship is like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?
--Emily Brontë

Our most difficult task as a friend is to offer understanding when we don't understand. --Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The friend within the man is that part of him which belongs to you and opens to you a door which never, perhaps, is opened to another.  Such a friend is true, and all he says is true; and he loves you even if he hates you in other mansions of his heart. --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert

We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies.  Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.  The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature. --Abraham Lincoln

Yes we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter.  I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front.  We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often.  I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check her diary when we arrange to meet. --Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, 1992

It takes a long time to grow an old friend. --John Leonard He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
True friends stab you in the front. --Oscar Wilde

Strangers are just friends waiting to happen. --Rod McKuen, Looking for a Friend  (Thank you, Carolyn.)

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

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean 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.  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 curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. --Henri Nouwen

Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need most. --American Proverb

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. --William Blake

The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried. --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate

A true friend reaches for your hand and touches your heart. --Attributed to Heather Pryor

Friendship is a sheltering tree. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We are keenly aware of the faults of our friends, but if they like us enough it doesn't matter. --Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends. --Shirley Maclaine

Friendship is Love, without his wings. --Lord Byron, L'Amitié est l'Amour sans Ailes

But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely.  Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain 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. --Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859

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

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. --Thomas Jefferson

A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world. --Lois Wyse

The best time to make friends is before you need them. --Ethel Barrymore

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

A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself. --Frances Ward Weller

There is magic in long-distance friendships.  They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound. --Diana Cortes

If you're alone, I'll be your shadow.  If you want to cry, I'll be your shoulder.  If you want a hug, I'll be your pillow.  If you need to be happy, I'll be your smile.  But anytime you need a friend, I'll just be me. --Author Unknown

A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us to be what we should. --Author Unknown

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away. --Barbara Kingsolver

Probably no man ever had a friend that he did not dislike a little. --E.W. Howe

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul. --Edith Wharton

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, www.robertbrault.com

'Tis a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his. --Benjamin Franklin

The best rule of friendship is to keep your heart a little softer than your head. --Author Unknown

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. --Alice Duer Miller

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive . --Anäis Nin

Friends are relatives you make for yourself. --Eustache Deschamps

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. --Emil Ludwig

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Journals, 1843

Ah, how good it feels!  The hand of an old friend. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends. --Samuel Pepys

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hold a true friend with both your hands. --Nigerian Proverb

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of. --Sarah Orne Jewett

I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world. --Blaise Pascal

Friendship is Love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil. --Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

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

The best way to mend a broken heart is time and girlfriends. --Gwyneth Paltrow

Friendship is one mind in two bodies. --Menclus

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

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

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world. --Thomas A. Edison

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

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

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

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. --William Hazlitt

In my friend, I find a second self. --Isabel Norton

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. --Ralph Waldo Emerson