quotations and passages on friendship

To have a good friend is
one of the highest
delights of life;
to be a good friend is
one of the noblest and
most difficult undertakings.
Anon

friendship2 - friendship3

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

Benjamin Franklin

The most I can do for my
friends is simply to be
their friend. I have no
wealth to bestow upon
them. If they know that
I am happy in loving them,
they will want no other
reward. Is not friendship
divine in this?

Henry David Thoreau

It is the steady and merciless increase of occupations,
the augmented speed at which we are always trying to live,
the crowding of each day with more work than it can profitably hold,
which has cost us, among other things, the undisturbed enjoyment of friends. Friendship takes time, and we have no time to give it.

Agnes Repplier (1894)

A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily,
adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously,
and continues a friend unchangeably.

William Penn

Oh, the miraculous energy that flows between two people who care enough to get beyond surfaces and games, who are willing to take
the risks of being totally open, of listening, of responding with
the whole heart. How much we can do for each other!

Alex
Noble

Epicurus

Of all the gifts that wise Providence grants us to make life full and happy, friendship is
the most beautiful.

I didn't find my friends;
the good God gave them to me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people
than you can in two years of trying to get other people interested in you.

Dale Carnegie

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

We rejoice in the joys of our friends as much as we do our own,
and we are equally grieved at their sorrows. Wherefore the wise people
will feel toward their friends as they do toward themselves, and whatever labor they would encounter with a view to their own pleasure, they will encounter also for the sake of their friends.

Cicero

[A] workable and effective way to meet and overcome difficulties is
to take on someone else's problems. It is a strange fact but you can
often handle two difficulties--your own and somebody else's--better than
you can handle your own alone. That truth is based on a subtle law of self-giving
or outgoingness whereby you develop a self-strengthening in the process.

Norman Vincent Peale

George Eliot

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, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take
and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with
the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

Silences make the real conversations between friends.
Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.

Margaret Lee Runbeck

We take care of our health, we lay up money, we make our room tight,
and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that they
shall not be wanting in the best property of all--friends?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself
he or she doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.

Laurence J. Peter

Thomas Hughes

Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends, for it is one of God's best gifts.
It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out of one's self,
and appreciating whatever is noble and loving in another.

I want a warm and faithful friend,
To cheer the adverse hour;
Who ne'er to flatter will descend,
Nor bend the knee to power,--
A friend to chide me when I'm wrong,
My inmost soul to see;
And that my friendship prove as strong
For him as his for me.

John Quincy Adams

So long as we love, we serve; so long as we are loved by others,
I should say that we are almost indispensable;
and no people are useless while they have friends.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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I am treating you as my friend, asking you
to share my present minuses in the hope I can ask you to share my future pluses.

Katherine Mansfield

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see
a noble image of yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

Good friendships are fragile things and require as much care
as any other fragile and precious thing.

Randolph Bourne

Aristotle

Friends are an aid to the young, to guard them from error;
to the elderly, to attend to their wants and to supplement
their failing power of action; to those in the prime of life,
to assist them to noble deeds.

Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures,
and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

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

I destroy my enemies by making them my friends.

Abraham Lincoln