Quotes about friends

The mind is lowered through association with inferiors. With equals it attains equality; and with superiors, superiority.

— Hitopadesa

Friendship Never explain -- your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe it anyway. A real friend never gets in your way, unless you happen to be on the way down. A friend is someone you can do nothing with and enjoy it. However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. It is not so much the example of others we imitate, as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

— Eric Hoffer

However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. It is not so much the example of others we imitate, as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

— Eric Hoffer

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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The only way not to break a friendship is not to drop it.

— Julie Holz

The difficulty is not that great to die for a friend, the hard part is finding a friend worth dying for.

— Henry Home

A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother.

— Homer

Two friends, two bodies with one soul inspired.

— Homer

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

— Edgar Watson Howe

Don't abuse your friends and expect them to consider it criticism.

— Edgar Watson Howe

It may be a cold, clammy thing to say, but those that treat friendship the same as any other selfishness seem to get the most out of it.

— Edgar Watson Howe

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.

— Edgar Watson Howe

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

— Tehyi Hsieh

If you have no enemies you are apt to be in the same predicament in regard to friends.

— Elbert Hubbard

Your friend is that man who knows all about you, and still likes you.

— Elbert Hubbard

The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, then you've had a great life.

— Lee Iacocca

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to keep by force of inertia.

— William James

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

— Thomas Jefferson

To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.

— Thomas Jefferson

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?

— Thomas Jefferson

A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept.

— St. Jerome

True friendship ought never to conceal what it thinks.

— St. Jerome

The friendship that can cease has never been real.

— St. Jerome

When you face a crisis, you know who your true friends are.

— Earvin ''Magic'' Johnson

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone; one should keep his friendships in constant repair.

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Samuel Johnson

Never, my dear Sir, do you take it into your head that I do not love you; you may settle yourself in full confidence both of my love and my esteem; I love you as a kind man, I value you as a worthy man, and hope in time to reverence you as a man of exemplary piety.

— Samuel Johnson

The endearing elegance of female friendship.

— Samuel Johnson

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

— Samuel Johnson

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

— Thomas Jones

He who has not the weakness of friendship has not the strength.

— Joseph Joubert

Plant a seed of friendship; reap a bouquet of happiness.

— Lois L. Kaufman

Love Him, and keep Him for thy Friend, who, when all go away, will not forsake thee, nor suffer thee to perish at the last.

— Thomas Kempis

The real test of friendship is: Can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy together those moments of life that are utterly simple? They are the moments people looks back on at the end of life and number as their most sacred experiences.

— Eugene Kennedy

The first day one is a guest, the second a burden, and the third a pest.

— Jean De La Bruyere

Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.

— Jean De La Fontaine

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

— Jean De La Fontaine

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

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see another mountain in my life.

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

A true friend is one who overlooks your failures and tolerates your successes.

— Doug Larson

Be not the fourth friend of him who had three before and lost them.

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

If you want to make a dangerous man your friend, let him do you a favor.

— Lewis E. Lawes

Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or to keep one.

— Robert E. Lee

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.

— John Leonard

He is a fine friend. He stabs you in the front.

— Leonard Louis Levinson

Remember, the greatest gift is not found in a store nor under a tree, but in the hearts of true friends.

— Cindy Lew

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

Show me a friend in need and I'll show you a pest.

— Joe E. Lewis

I desire to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.

— Abraham Lincoln

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

— Abraham Lincoln

A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gal. So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey which catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the highroad to his reason.

— Abraham Lincoln

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

— Abraham Lincoln

I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, who has sight so keen and strong That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroken; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship Let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Your friendship is a glowing ember Through the year; and each December From its warm and living spark We kindle flame against the dark And with its shining radiance light Our tree of faith on Christmas night.

— Thelma J. Lund

To gather with God's people in united adoration of the Father is as necessary to the Christian life as prayer.

— Martin Luther

Friendship will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long.

— Robert Lynd

The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends thought I didn't exist.

— Aaron Machado

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

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Marbury

No young man starting in life could have better capital than plenty of friends. They will strengthen his credit, support him in every great effort, and make him what, unaided, he could never be. Friends of the right sort will help him more -- to be happy and successful -- than much money...

— Orison Swett Marden

We know our friends by their defects rather than their merits.

— W. Somerset Maugham

All things being equal, people will do business with a friend; all things being unequal, people will still do business with a friend.

— Mark Mccormack

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

— Mignon McLaughlin

A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.

— Bernard Meltzer

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.

— Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

Friends are like melons; shall I tell you why? To find one good you must one hundred try.

— Claude Mermet

The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away.

— Wilson Mizner

If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed but by answering: Because it was he, because it was myself.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

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

— Charles De Montesquieu

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

God gives us our relatives -- thank God we can choose our friends.

— Ethel Watts Mumford

The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them.

— Hector Hugh Munro

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.

— George Jean Nathan

The love of our private friends is the only preparatory exercise for the love of all men.

— John Henry Newman

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.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

— Anais Nin

In a friend you find a second self.

— Isabelle Norton

The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.

— Notebook

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

— Austin O'Malley

A home-made friend wears longer than one you buy in the market.

— Austin O'Malley

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

— Ovid

Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.

— Jesse Owens

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 unchangeably.

— William Penn

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

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

— Samuel Pepys

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

— Ralph B. Perry

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

Keep out of the suction caused by those who drift backwards.

— E. K. Piper

Nothing is there more friendly to a man than a friend in need.

— Titus Maccius Plautus

Every man, however wise, needs the advice of some sagacious friend in the affairs of life.

— Titus Maccius Plautus