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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"It is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we beginto keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins."
"Nothing but great antiquity can make graveyards interesting to me. I have no friends there."
"It is impossible to say all that we think, even to our truest Friend. We may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered."
"A man's social and spiritual discipline must answer to his corporeal. He must lean on a friend who has a hard breast, as he wouldlie on a hard bed. He must drink cold water for his only beverage. So he must not hear sweetened and colored words, but pure and refreshing truths. He must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympathy of friends."
"While my friend was my friend, he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him. When he became my enemy, he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow."
"My friend is one who takes me for what I am. A stranger takes me for something else than what I am. . . . What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue."
"We must love our friend so much that she shall be associated with our purest and holiest thoughts alone."
"Our actual Friends are but distant relations of those to whom we are pledged."
"I have never met with a friend who furnished me sea-room. I have only tacked a few times and come to anchor - not sailed - made no voyage, carried no venture."
"I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie themselves and deny me continually."
"I would that I were worthy to be any man's Friend."
"We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods."
"My friend is one... who take me for what I am."
"Creating a close connection to those you do business with has its many risks, rewards and consequences. There are few things in business I have encountered that are more difficult than firing someone, particularly if that someone has always been, or has become a friend. On the flip side, I have been rewarded with many friends."
"A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know."
"We should not talk about our friends: otherwise we will talk away the feeling of friendship."
"A friend whose hopes we cannot satisfy is a friend we would rather have as an enemy."
"The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade."
"I won't go hunting with you, Jake, but I'll go chasing women."
"I never believed in trying to do anything. Whatever I set out to do I found I had already accomplished."
