quotations about friendship
Friendship is not an obsolete sentiment. It is as true now as in Aristotle's time that no one would care to live without friends, though he had all other good things. It is still necessary to our life in its largest sense.
HUGH B. BLACK
Friendship
We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
It is a strange thing to behold, what gross errors and extreme absurdities many (especially of the greater sort) do commit, for want of a friend to tell them of them; to the great damage both of their fame and fortune.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral
The company of just and righteous men is better than wealth and a rich estate.
EURIPIDES
Aegeus [fragment]
This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
ELIE WIESEL
From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences
Lonesome creates diseases that friendship cures.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Friendship", Essays
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God, the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts?
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
[It] is the juvenal period of life when friendships are formed, and habits established, that will stick by one.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Alexander Hamilton, Sep. 1, 1796
The true beauty of friendship is that it is bottomless.
ROGER & SALLY HORCHOW
The Art of Friendship
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
Out of Solitude
While friendship itself has an air of eternity about it, seeming to transcend all natural limits, there is hardly any emotion so utterly at the mercy of time. We form friendships, and grow out of them. It might almost be said that we cannot retain the faculty of friendship unless we are continually making new friends.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
The Friendship of Christ
Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
The Book of Friendship
Friendship ... is essential to intellectuals. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.
MARY McCARTHY
How I Grew
We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Friendship can exist between persons of different sexes, without any coarse or sensual feelings; yet a woman always looks upon a man as a man, and so a man will look upon a woman as a woman.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères