Friend Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: He is the one. But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.

Vincent van Gogh

How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among the friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.

Michel de Montaigne

"Bosh," he said, "On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres."

G. K. Chesterton

Glee! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand. Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals! How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, But the forty?
Did they come back no more? Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller's eye;
And the children no
further question,
And only the waves reply.

Emily Dickinson

Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is a time, when there seems to be a particular need for friends of wisdom and truth to join together.

Albert Einstein

Life becomes livable only to the extent that death is treated as a friend, never as an enemy.

Friend, bethink you first what it is that you would do, and then what your own nature is able to bear.

I am truly a "lone traveler" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart. In the face of all this, I have never lost a sense of distance and the need for solitude.

Albert Einstein

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

We must therefore... hold them [the British] as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

Thomas Jefferson

And thence from Athens turn away our eyes To seek new friends and stranger companies.

William Shakespeare

To be intimate with a foolish friend is like going to bed to a razor.

Benjamin Franklin

But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had-power.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by any means, succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land, with bright prospects for the future; and this too, so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will indeed be a glorious consummation.

Abraham Lincoln

And do so, love, yet when they have devised
What strainèd touches rhetoric can lend,
Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathized
In true plain words by thy true-telling friend;
And their gross painting might be better used
Where cheeks need blood; in thee it is abused.

William Shakespeare

And it will always happen that he who is not your friend will request your neutrality and he who is your friend will ask you to declare yourself by taking up arms. And irresolute princes, in order to avoid present dangers, follow the neutral road most of the time, and most of the time they are ruined.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Man may have the most excellent judgment in all other matters, and yet go wrong in those which concern himself; because here the will comes in and deranges the intellect at once. Therefore let a man take counsel of a friend. A doctor can cure everyone but himself; if he falls ill, he sends for a colleague.

Arthur Schopenhauer

And I have again observed, my dear friend, in this trifling affair, that misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up – painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other — that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.

It was now the hour that turns back the longing of seafarers and melts their hearts, the day they have bidden dear friends farewell, and pierces the new traveler with love if he hears in the distance the bell that seems to mourn the dying day.

Dante Alighieri

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

John F. Kennedy

A good cause is often injured more by ill-timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies. Persuasion, perseverance and patience are the best advocates on questions depending on the will of others.

Thomas Jefferson

Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people—that's in your hands.

They who dare to ask anything of a friend, by their very request seem to imply that they would do anything for the sake of that friend.