quotations about friendship
My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the Deity in me and in them, both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex and circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
Friendship is the correspondence of reciprocal regard.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
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 appellation.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
For me, ending a friendship is even harder than ending a romantic relationship. Ending a friendship is like admitting failure, which isn't something I'm good at. Even if I know a friendship isn't working, I'll hold onto it in the hopes that maybe it will magically somehow fix itself. Of course, it almost never happens that way, and soon you just find yourselves drifting further and further apart until they're reduced to a face you see on social media.
SA'IYDA SHABAZZ
"This Is Why Some Friendships End--And Others Last", Scary Mommy, February 19, 2019
Friendship, “the wine of life,” should, like a well-stocked cellar, be continually renewed; and it is consolatory to think, that although we can seldom add what will equal the generous first growths of our youth, yet friendship becomes insensibly old in much less time than is commonly imagined, and not many years are required to make it mellow and pleasant.
JAMES BOSWELL
Life of Johnson
In a quarrel between two friends, if one of them, even the injured one, were in the retirement of his chamber, to consider himself as the hired advocate of the other at the court of wronged friendship; and were to omit all the facts which told in his own favour, to exaggerate all that could possibly be said against himself, and to conjure up from his imagination a few circumstances of the same tendency; he might with little effort make a good case for his former friend. Let him be assured, that whatever the most skilful advocate could say, his poor friend really believes and feels; and then, instead of wondering at the insolence of such a traitor walking about in open day, he will pity his friend's delusion, have some gentle misgivings as to the exact propriety of his own conduct, and perhaps sue for an immediate reconciliation.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
The friendships of the world are often confederacies in vice.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings, and suffocations, are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind; you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend; to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral
Friendship is such an elastic word. There never was an age when it stood for so many things in private, and was yet so absolutely non-existent in fact.
OUIDA
Friendship: A Story of Society
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Municipal Gallery Re-Visited
Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded.
FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY
"On Friendship", Adam & Eve and the City