Friend Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.

Rabindranath Tagore

It is impossible to say all that we think, even to our truest Friend. We may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered.

Henry David Thoreau

There is no love.
There's only love of men and women, love
Of children, love of friends, of men, of God:
Divine love, human love, parental love,
Roughly discriminated for the rough.

So it was, my dear Watson, that at two o'clock today I found myself in my old armchair in my own old room, and only wishing that I could have seen my old friend Watson in the other chair which he has so often adorned. - Sherlock Holmes.

Arthur Conan Doyle

I have liv'd long enough: my way of life Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf; And that which should accompany old age, As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but, in their stead, Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

William Shakespeare

When asked what he thought about the existence of heaven or hell:

I don't want to express an opinion. You see, I have friends in both places.

Sometimes quoted as: I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.

We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

My friends are my "estate." Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.

Emily Dickinson

Call a truce, then, to our labours let us feast with friends and neighbours,
And be merry as the custom of our caste;
For if faint and forced the laughter, and if sadness follow after,
We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.

Rudyard Kipling

Oh, a friend! How true is that old saying, that the enjoyment of one is sweeter and more necessary than that of the elements of water and fire!

Michel de Montaigne

Nowhere would anyone grant that science and poetry can be united. They forgot that science arose from poetry, and failed to see that a change of times might beneficently reunite the two as friends, at a higher level and to mutual advantage.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Lost in an immense forest at night, I have only a little light to show me the way. Along comes a stranger who says to me: Friend blow out your candle, the better to find your way. This stranger is a theologian.

A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles…Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.

George Bernard Shaw

I spend a lot of time parenting because I'm home. A friend of mine told me that the average father sees each kid an average of twenty-two minutes a week, which I found almost unbelievable. Mine are in my hip pocket all the time. And I like it that way.

Let me be suffered to extend
Compassion to a hapless friend.

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 that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy—that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.

We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have neither time nor disposition to enter into discussion with the Friend, and end this occasion by suggesting for her consideration the question whether, if it be true that the Lord has appointed me to do the work she has indicated, it is not probable that he would have communicated knowledge of the fact to me as well as to her.

Abraham Lincoln

Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of every friendless name the friend.

I entirely appreciate loyalty to one's friends, but loyalty to the cause of justice and honor stands above it.

Theodore Roosevelt

Shall we say that the gospel story is the work of the imagination? My friend, such things are not imagined; and the doings of Socrates, which no one doubts, are less well attested than those of Jesus Christ.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!

I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice.

Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky