Friendship quotes
2.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside friendship — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"To give and receive advice - the former with freedom, and yet without bitterness, the latter with patience and without irritation - is peculiarly appropriate to geniune friendship."
"Man's best support is a very dear friend."
"A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring."
"You're like a dull knife, it just ain't cutting."
"Friendships begin with liking or gratitude- roots that can be pulled up."
"You don't have to write to me if you don't feel like it. There's no real friendship without absolute freedom."
"It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men - so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two agnostics. "I say God is One," and "I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship."
". . . For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million."
"We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste."
"What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!"
"The story, from beginning to end, I found again in a heart of a friend."
"An enemy can partly ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect."
"Love and happiness remind me of sticky peanut butter. When you spread them around, you can't help but end up getting some on yourself!"
"What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736."
"Lovers and even some family members may come and go but the friendships that take root abide. Sometimes the best of what is true survives as if it had an independent will: The coals of friendship keep themselves alive until something happens to rekindle them."
"Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff."
"Tact is the rare ability to keep silent while two friends are arguing, and you know both of them are wrong."
"No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesn't show he's been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently - and tolerantly - to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that."
"It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past."
"A man is judged by his friends, for the wise and the foolish have never agreed."
