Friendship Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

No human being can ever 'own' another, whether in friendship, love, marriage, or parenthood.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The first effect marriage had on me was to increase my lack of interest in sex.... Actually our marriage was a sort of friendship with sexual privileges.

Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship.

When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

It is not for minds like ours to give or to receive flatter; yet the praises of sincerity have ever been permitted to the voice of friendship

But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

Henry David Thoreau

If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.

Lay down this rule of friendship: neither ask nor consent to do what is wrong. The plea, 'for friendship's sake,' is a discreditable one, and should not be admitted for a moment. We should ask from friends and do for friends only what is good.

Assure thee, if I do vow a friendship, I'll perform it to the last article." —Othello, Act III, Scene iii

William Shakespeare

For, the advantages which fashion values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.

The calm and tolerant atmosphere that prevailed during the elections depicts the type of South Africa we can build. It set the tone for the future. We might have our differences, but we are one people with a common destiny in our rich variety of culture, race and tradition.
People have voted for the party of their choice and we respect that. This is democracy.
I hold out a hand of friendship to the leaders of all parties and their members, and ask all of them to join us in working together to tackle the problems we face as a nation. An ANC government will serve all the people of South Africa, not just ANC members.

Toward all other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of cordial and sincere friendship. We must show not only in our words, but in our deeds, that we are earnestly desirous of securing their good will by acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their rights.

Theodore Roosevelt

There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains itsmaxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.

Henry David Thoreau

A generous friendship no cold medium knows,
Burns with one love, with one resentment glows;
One should our interests and our passions be,
My friend must hate the man that injures me.

His Holiness Pope John Paul II was a man I held in high regard. His experience in Poland and my own difficulties with communists gave us an immediate ground.
The Pope was very sympathetic to the Tibetan problem. Of course, as the head of an institution trying to establish good relations with China and seriously concerned about the status of millions of Christians in china he could not express this publicly or officially. But right from the start of our friendship he revealed to me privately that he had a clear understanding of the Tibetan problem because of his own experience of communism in Poland. This gave me great personal encouragement.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."

Friendship is always helpful, but love sometimes even does harm.

Seneca the Younger

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

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the toughfibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson