quotations about 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
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How I Grew
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
We often choose a friend as we do a mistress, for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
The friendships of the world are oft confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasure.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Cato
[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
Though most of the friendships of the world ill deserve the name of friendships; yet a man may make use of them on occasion, as of a traffic whose returns are uncertain, and in which 'tis usual to be cheated.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Moral Maxims
Some friendships are formed by a commonality of interests and ideas: you both love judo or camping or making your own sausage. Other friendships are forged in alliance against a common enemy.
DAVID SEDARIS
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
Lonesome creates diseases that friendship cures.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
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
Choose a friend as thou dost a wife, 'till Death separate you.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
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
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
Letters of friendship require no study.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Major-General Knox, Jan. 5, 1785
Of what use the friendliest disposition even, if there are no hours given to Friendship, if it is forever postponed to unimportant duties and relations? Friendship first, Friendship last.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Friendship
It is never easier to forget friends than when we imagine they have forgotten us--friendship, like love, requires reciprocal assurance of continuity.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Friendship should be more than biting Time can sever.
T. S. ELIOT
Murder in the Cathedral
Friendship has been called the sweetener of life. It is a compound made up of truth and kindness, prudence and piety.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
If you're ever in a jam, here I am
If you're ever in a mess, S-O-S
If you ever feel so happy, you land in jail, I'm your bail.
It's friendship, friendship, just a perfect blendship.
When other friendships have been forgot,
Ours will still be hot.
JUDY GARLAND
"Friendship"