300 Friendship Quotes

Time to take another little break from the “All About You!” series for something lighter. How’s everybody doing? I’m still gaining readers—which is great! Very encouraging to know that there are quite a few of you at least reading this stuff, if not actually doing the exercises! But, I hope many of you are doing them—or will someday soon when you’re ready.

Even doing just a few of the exercises when you feel like it now and then will help you learn exponentially more about yourself than you could ever realize by just sitting around thinking about it without ever writing any of your flashes of insights or long-lost recollections down. At the very least, share some of these with your good friends. Just the telling of it will force you to make sense of it both for your friends and for you in a way that you would never try to do if you kept your musings to yourself.

300 QUOTES ABOUT FRIENDSHIP

If you thought 200 quotes about happiness was a lot, get a load of these! Everyone who was ever famous seems to have had something interesting to say about friendship. 300 is insane! Most of these quotes seem to equate the pursuit of happiness as nothing more or less than the pursuit of friends. However, there are some witty exceptions—and not all in jest. Hope you enjoy them! I know I did!

1. Friends are born, not made.
- Henry Brooks Adams

2. Every man should have a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.
- Henry Brooks Adams

3. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
- Henry Brooks Adams

4. A friend in power is a friend lost.
- Henry Brooks Adams

5. The friendships of the world are oft confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasures.
- John Addison

6. Stay is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.
- Louisa May Alcott

7. Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But, if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.
- Muhammad Ali

8. A faithful friend is the medicine of life.
- The Apocrypha

9. Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.
- St. Thomas Aquinas

10. Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you.
- Yassir Arafat

11. I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is greater or better than friendship.
- Pietro Aretino

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

13. Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
- Aristotle

14. Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.
- Aristotle

15. Friendship is essentially a partnership.
- Aristotle

16. Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
- Aristotle

17. A friend is someone who sees through you and still enjoys the view.
- Wilma Askinas

18. To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.
- Paul Aubuchon

19. Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
- Paul Aubuchon

20. Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
- W. H. Auden

21. There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.
- Sir Francis Bacon

22. The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
- Sir Francis Bacon

23. We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.
- Sir Francis Bacon

24. Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.
- Nicholson Baker

25. I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me.
- Dave Barry

26. A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.
- Saint Basil

27. It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
- Henry Ward Beecher

28. There is nothing worth the wear of winning, but laughter and the love of friends.
- Hilaire Belloc

29. Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.
- Annie Besant

30. Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe unto him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.
- The Bible: Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

31. A book is a friend; a good book is a good friend. It will talk to you when you want it to talk, and it will keep still when you want it to keep still; and there are not many friends who know enough to do that.
- B. A. Billingsly

32. The bird a nest
the spider a web
the human friendship.
- William Blake

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

34. Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache; do be my enemy—for friendship’s sake.
- William Blake

35. A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself.
- James Boswell

36. I love such mirth as does not make friends ashamed to look upon one another next morning.
- Nelson Boswell

37. Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as any other fragile and precious thing.
- Randolph S. Bourne

38. False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.
- John Christian Bovee

39. The heart may think it knows better: The senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
- Elizabeth Bowen

40. Help the stranger for it might be God, Jesus, or the Devil. If the devil is mad at you where else do you have to go?
- Mike Brown

41. How does one keep from “growing old inside?” Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people … Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.
- Robert McAfee Brown

42. When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
- Anatole Broyard

43. The first day one is a guest, the second a burden, and the third a pest.
- Jean de la Bruyere

44. The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.
- Buddha

45. Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another.
- Eustace Budgell

46. One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

47. Win hearts, and you have hands and purses.
- Lord Burleigh

48. A friend is somebody you want to be around when you feel like being by yourself.
- Barbara Burrow

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

50. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead.
Walk beside me and be my friend.
- Albert Camus

51. Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
- Albert Camus

52. If you want to win friends, make it a point to remember them. If you remember my name, you pay me a subtle compliment; you indicate that I have made an impression on you. Remember my name and you add to my feeling of importance
- Dale Carnegie

53. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
- Rachel Carson

54. Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends.
- Mary Catherwood

55. A man must eat a peck of salt with his friend, before he knows him.
- Miguel de Cervantes

56. Most people enjoy the inferiority of their best friends.
- Lord Chesterfield

57. It is virtue—virtue!—which both creates and preserves friendship. On it depends harmony of interest, permanence, fidelity.
- Cicero

58. Life is nothing without friendship.
- Cicero

59. Never injure a friend, even in jest.
- Cicero

60. A friend is, as it were, a second self.
- Cicero

61. Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.
- Cicero

62. Give me one friend, just one, who meets
The needs of all my varying moods.
- Esther M. Clark

63. Friendship is a sheltering tree.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

64. Silence is the true friend that never betrays.
- Confucius

65. Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

66. And what a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised.
- Colette

67. In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends.
- John Churton Collins

68. True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
- Charles Caleb Colton

69. Have no friends not equal to yourself.
- Confucius

70. I do not want a friend
Who smiles when I smile
Who weeps when I weep
For my shadow in the pool
Can do better than that.
- Confucius

71. Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannot congeal in winter.
- James Fenimore Cooper

72. Thus nature has no love for solitude, and always leans, as it were, on some support; and the sweetest support is found in the most intimate friendship.
- Cicero

73. Friendship makes prosperity more brilliant, and lightens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
- Cicero

74. A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway.
- Father Jerome Cummings

75. Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: Have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
- The Dhammapada

76. We need not think alike to love alike.
- Francis David

77. Friendship: a building contract you sign with laughter and break with tears.
- Marlene Dietrich

78. Friends are God’s way of taking care of us.
- Marlene Dietrich

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

80. As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.
- Diogenes

81. The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches but to reveal to him his own.
- Benjamin Disraeli

82. There is magic in the memory of schoolboy friendships; it softens the heart, and even affects the nervous system of those who have no heart.
- Benjamin Disraeli

83. To find a friend one must close one eye; to keep him, two.
- Norman Douglas

84. It’s afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn’t necessarily prove that you loved him.
- Marguerite Duras

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

86. What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. They are but trifles, to be sure but, scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.
- George Eliot

87. No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
- George Eliot

88. Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
- George Eliot

89. What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
- George Eliot

90. Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away!
- George Eliot

91. Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.
- George Eliot

92. The only way to have a friend is to be one.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

93. Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

94. A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

95. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

97. A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

98. Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

99. The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

100. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

101. He who has a thousand friends
Has not a friend to spare,
While he who has one enemy
Shall meet him everywhere.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

102. A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

103. Go often to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

104. Real friendship is shown in times of trouble; prosperity is full of friends.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

105. Spiritual force is stronger than material force; thoughts rule the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

107. We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.
- Epicurus

108. One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.
- Euripides

109. My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet. She’s now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia.
- Dame Edna Everage

110. One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.
- Clifton Fadiman

111. I remember you and recall you without effort, without exercise of will; that is, by natural impulse, indicated by a sense of duty, or of obligation. And that, I take it, is the only sort of remembering worth the having. When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy—that it is built upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.
- Douglas Fairbanks

112. It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

114. My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
- Henry Ford

115. Always hold your head up, but be careful to keep your nose at a friendly level.
- Max L. Forman

116. If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
- Edward Morgan Forster

117. I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody.
- Benjamin Franklin

118. A good friend is my nearest relation.
- Thomas Fuller

119. No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend till he is unhappy.
- Thomas Fuller

120. A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn.
- Thomas Fuller

121. Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.
- Thomas Fuller

122. Purchase not friends by gifts; when thou ceasest to give, such will cease to love.
- Thomas Fuller

123. My friend is he who will tell me my faults in private.
- Solomon Ibn Gabirol

124. You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.
- Indira Gandhi

125. It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
- Mahatma Gandhi

126. True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.
- David Tyson Gentry

127. Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

128. What is uttered from the heart alone,
Will win the hearts of others to your own.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

129. I can tell you, Honest Friend, what to believe:
Believe life; it teaches better than book or orator.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

130. Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.
- Baltasar Gracian

131. A friend is someone, who upon seeing another friend in immense pain, would rather be the one experiencing the pain than to have to watch their friend suffer.
- Amanda Grier

132. The verb “to love” in Persian is “to have a friend.” “I love you” translated literally is “I have you as a friend,” and “I don’t like you” simply means “I don’t have you as a friend.”
- Shusha Guppy

133. The making of friends, who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man’s success in life.
- Edward Everett Hale

134. Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
- Warren G. Harding

135. I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends … They’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights.
- Warren G. Harding

136. For believe me, in this world which is ever slipping from under our feet, it is the prerogative of friendship to grow old with one’s friends.
- Arthur S. Hardy

137. The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.
- William Hazlitt

138. Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind, it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate—and quickly.
- Robert Anson Heinlein

139. The best mirror is an old friend.
- George Herbert

140. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

141. The only way not to break a friendship is not to drop it.
- Julie Holz

142. A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother.
- Homer

143. 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

144. 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

145. Instead of loving your enemies—treat your friends a little better.
- Edgar Watson Howe

146. Life is partly what we make it, and partly what is made by the friends whom we choose.
- Tehyi Hsieh

147. Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
- Elbert Hubard

148. Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
- David Hume

149. It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
- Douglas Hurd

150. It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.
- Zora Neale Hurston

151. The happiest moments my heart knows are those in which it is pouring forth its affections to a few esteemed characters.
- Thomas Jefferson

152. I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man’s milk and restorative cordial.
- Thomas Jefferson

153. 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

154. Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
- Thomas Jefferson

155. A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept.
- Saint Jerome

156. The friendship that can cease has never been real.
- Saint Jerome

157. True friendship ought never to conceal what it thinks.
- Saint Jerome

158. 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

159. We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
- Samuel Johnson

160. There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
- Samuel Johnson

161. Always set high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.
- Samuel Johnson

162. 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

163. 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

164. To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
- Samuel Johnson

165. Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
- Thomas Jones

166. In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving—instead of actually getting up and leaving.
- Erica Jong

167. True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.
- Ben Jonson

168. Choose in marriage only a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man.
- Joseph Joubert

169. He who has not the weakness of friendship has not the strength.
- Joseph Joubert

170. Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.
- Eugene Kennedy

171. 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.
- Emily Kimbrough

172. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

173. Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

174. Because I’m technologically able to find a like-minded person on the other side of the globe, I’m also more interested in making friends with my next-door neighbor.
- Jeffrey Klein

175. Pure love produces pure nonsense.
- Jonathan Klinger

176. Some people think only intellect counts: Knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.
- Dean Koontz

177. Be not the fourth friend of him who had three before and lost them.
- Johann Kaspar Lavater

178. Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or to keep one.
- Robert E. Lee

179. Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren’t bad people; they’re just acquaintances.
- Jay Leno

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

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

182. Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.”
- C. S. Lewis

183. Show me a friend in need and I’ll show you a pest.
- Joe E. Lewis

184. Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
- Abraham Lincoln

185. I don’t like that man. I’m going to have to get to know him better.
- Abraham Lincoln

186. 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

187. If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others, too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

188. Your worst enemy could be your best friend, and your best friend your worst enemy.
- Bob Marley

189. There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person’s eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living.
- Don Marquis

190. It’s no good trying to keep up old friendships. It’s painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.
- W. Somerset Maugham

191. There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
- Rollo May

192. You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people, than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
- Bernard Meltzer

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

194. Friendship is one mind in two bodies.
- Mencius

195. Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
- Karl Menninger

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

197. Those truly linked don’t need correspondence. When they meet again after many years apart, their friendship is as true as ever.
- Deng Ming-Dao

198. No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.
- Francois Mocuriac

199. I’m a controversial figure. My friends either dislike me or hate me.
- Toni Morrison

200. Love demands infinitely less than friendship.
- George Jean Nathan

201. Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.
- Gloria Naylor

202. The love of our private friends is the only preparatory exercise for the love of all men.
- John Henry Newman

203. It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

204. 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

205. When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle 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

206. A good friend can shield you from the storm.
- Rhea Olsen

207. Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.
- Blaise Pascal

208. Friends are needed, both for joy and for sorrow.
- Samuel Paterson

209. Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.
- Samuel Paterson

210. Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love.
- Charles Peguy

211. 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

212. 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

213. Make friends not enemies, and you will always have eyes in the back of your head.
- Eric Pio

214. What is thine is mine, and all mine is thine.
- Titus Maccius Plautus

215. One’s oldest friend is the best.
- Titus Maccius Plautus

216. Every man, however wise, needs the advice of some sagacious friend in the affairs of life.
- Titus Maccius Plautus

217. A friend you have to buy won’t be worth what you pay for him.
- George D. Prentice

218. Don’t sacrifice your life to work and ideals. The most important things in life are human relations. I found that out too late.
- Katharine Susannah Prichard

219. True friendship’s laws are by this rule express’d,
Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.
- Alexander Pope

220. The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention … A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
- Rachel Naomi Remen

221. Though our communication wanes at times of absence, I’m aware of a strength that emanates in the background.
- Claudette Renner

222. I’ve always said that in politics, your enemies can’t hurt you, but your friends will kill you.
- Anne Richards

223. Every friend is to the other a sun, and a sunflower also. He attracts and follows.
- Jean Paul Richter

224. A friend is someone who makes me feel totally acceptable.
- Ene Riisna

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

226. However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.
- Francois La Rochefoucauld

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

228. It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.
- Francois La Rochefoucauld

229. Strangers are just friends I haven’t met yet.
- Will Rogers

230. Friends will abandon you in times of disgrace, but enemies will follow you to your death.
- Count of Romanones Figueroa

231. Friendship with oneself is all-important because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

232. A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
- Bertrand Russell

233. One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter.
- Francoise Sagan

234. There is no hope of joy except in human relations.
- Antoine de Sainte-Exupery

235. Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
- George Santayana

236. Good friends are good for your health.
- Irwin Sarason

237. Though friendship is not quick to burn,
It is explosive stuff.
- May Sarton

238. Friends show me what I can do, foes teach me what I should do.
- Friedrich Schiller

239. If you have no friends to share or rejoice in your success in life—if you cannot look back to those whom you owe gratitude, or forward to those to whom you ought to afford protection, still it is no less incumbent on you to move steadily in the path of duty; for your active excretions are due not only to society; but in humble gratitude to the Being who made you a member of it, with powers to save yourself and others.
- Sir Walter Scott

240. Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.
- Seneca

241. Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.
- Seneca

242. One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.
- Seneca

243. True friendship is never serene.
- Marquise de Sevigne

244. The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel, but do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new-hatched unfledged comrade.
- William Shakespeare

245. Words are easy, like the wind;
Faithful friends are hard to find.
- William Shakespeare

246. To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time.
- Cornelia Otis Skinner

247. Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
- Sydney Smith

248. The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.
- Logan Pearsall Smith

249. A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
- Logan Pearsall Smith

250. I can’t forgive my friends for dying; I don’t find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
- Logan Pearsall Smith

251. To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.
- Brandi Snyder

252. Friendship is one of the sweetest joys of life. Many might have failed beneath the bitterness of their trial had they not found a friend.
- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

253. A new friendship is like an unripened fruit—it may become either an orange or a lemon.
- Emma Stacey

254. No man is useless while he has a friend.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

255. A friend is a present you give yourself.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

256. We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

257. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?
- Robert Louis Stevenson

258. The very flexibility and ease which make men’s friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate—a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman’s bright eyes—he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

259. I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred—that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe

260. Truth and tears clear the way to a deep and lasting friendship.
- Mariede Svign

261. True friendship is never serene.
- Mariede Svign

262. Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.
- Jonathan Swift

263. Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance.
- Rabindranath Tagore

264. Join the company of lions rather than assume the lead among foxes.
- The Talmud

265. He makes no friends who never made a foe.
- Lord Alfred Tennyson

266. Of my friends, I am the only one I have left.
- Terence

267. If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
- Mother Teresa

268. It is not what you give your friend, but what you are willing to give him that determines the quality of friendship.
- Mary Dixon Thayer

269. Verily, great grace may go with a little gift; and precious are all things that come from friends.
- Theocritus

270. The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
- Henry David Thoreau

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

272. True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
- Henry David Thoreau

273. One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then.
- Henry David Thoreau

274. Where there is love, there is God also.
- Leo Tolstoy

275. Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
- Mark Twain

276. There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one—keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.
- Mark Twain

277. The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
- Mark Twain

278. Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
- Mark Twain

279. Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.
- Mark Twain

280. The wicked can have only accomplices, the voluptuous have companions in debauchery, self-seekers have associates, the politic assemble the factions, the typical idler has connections, princes have courtiers. Only the virtuous have friends.
- Voltaire

281. May God defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.
- Voltaire

282. No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
- Alice Walker

283. Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
- George Washington

284. Don’t make friends who are comfortable to be with. Make friends who will force you to lever yourself up.
- Thomas J. Watson

285. The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?”
- Simone Weil

286. Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.
- Simone Weil

287. A true friend is someone who is there for you when he’d rather be anywhere else.
- Len Wein

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

289. Money can’t buy you friends; but you do get a better class of enemies.
- Somers White

290. I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.
- Walt Whitman

291. Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession; friendship is never anything but sharing.
- Elie Wiesel

292. All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

293. Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.
- Oscar Wilde

294. True friends stab you in the front.
- Oscar Wilde

295. Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.
- Oscar Wilde

296. Friendship is to be purchased only by friendship. A man may have authority over others, but he can never have their hearts but by giving his own.
- Thomas Wilson

297. You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.
- Woodrow Wilson

298. A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.
- Walter Winchell

299. I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.
- Virginia Woolf

300. Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
- William Butler Yeats

CONCLUSION

Friendship, like everything else in life, is what you make of it. Quality, not quantity. Plant good seeds in fertile earth, and you’ll get nice, strong shoots. Nurture those shoots with integrity and keep the weeds at bay. Then, as the years pass, you’ll have a sturdy, living, breathing thing that flowers beautifully and bears delicious fruit as long as you let it continue to grow at its own pace, let it hibernate with the ebb and flow of the seasons, and love it. Yes, love your friendships like you love your friends! Maybe more. Because, long after our friends are gone from us, the memories of them still bring us so much happiness like we never imagined possible!

[Note: More friendship quotes in the comments section below! : ) Rather than changing the title of this post—which would require changing all the links, too—I simply added the ones I found later while working on other quote lists.]

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