Friend Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Listen, my friend, I've just come back from Mississippi and over there when you talk about the West Bank they think you mean Arkansas.

A steady patriot of the world alone,
The friend of every country but his own.

On the Jacobin

It is always well to accept your own shortcomings with candor but to regard those of your friends with polite incredulity.

The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.

Charles William Eliot

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

Got just enough room to be a friend of yours. Oh I hope you got room to be a friend of mine.

When Dan Quayle made a tacit comparison between himself and John Kennedy:

Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.

A rule I have had for years is: to treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal friend. His is not a creed, a mere doctrine, but it is He Himself we have.

Dwight L. Moody

I would rather have a million friends than a million dollars.

Eddie Rickenbacker

However near and dear to you may be your wife, children, friends, they are not you; they are outside of you.

John Buchanan Robinson

Thus much for thy assurance know;
a hollow friend is but a hellish foe.

Nicholas Breton

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.

All things being equal, people will do business with a friend; all things being unequal, people will still do business with a friend.

The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them;
It is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself.

With a cat you stand on much the same footing that you stand with a fine and dignified friend; if you forfeit his respect and confidence the relationship suffers. The cat, it is well to remember, remains the friend of man because it pleases him to do so and not because he must.

Carl Van Vechten

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

But please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.

My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. … Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.

A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them — a diminishing number in my case.

Make friends with the angels, who though invisible are always with you.... Often invoke them, constantly praise them, and make good use of their help and assistance in all your temporal and spiritual affairs.

Francis de Sales

To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him—two.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

Robert Louis Stevenson