Friendship Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

The friendship I have conceived will not be impaired by absence; but it may be no unpleasing circumstance to brighten the chain by a renewal of the covenant.

George Washington

Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy

Friedrich Nietzsche

Who would be so mocked with glory, or to live
But in a dream of friendship,
To have his pomp and all what state compounds
But only painted, like his varnished friends?

William Shakespeare

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be almost all friendships would be dissolved; the second effect, however, might be excellent, for a world without any friends would be felt to be intolerable, and we should learn to like each other without needing a veil of illusion to conceal from ourselves that we did not think each other absolutely perfect.

Bertrand Russell

To purchase Heaven has gold the power?
Can gold remove the mortal hour?
In life can love be bought with gold?
Are friendship's pleasures to be sold?
No--all that's worth a wish--a thought,
Fair virtue gives unbribed, unbought.
Cease then on trash thy hopes to bind,
Let nobler views engage thy mind.

Friendship is in the end no more than: "... a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The religion of my doctor or my lawyer cannot matter. That consideration has nothing in common with the functions of the friendship they owe me.

Michel de Montaigne

They are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes.

Thomas Jefferson

Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.

Henry David Thoreau

Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.

As in the case of wines that improve with age, the oldest friendships ought to be the most delightful.

As great enmities spring from great friendships, and mortal distempers from vigorous health, so do the most surprising and the wildest frenzies from the high and lively agitations of our souls.

Michel de Montaigne

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

I desire you in friendship, and I will one way or other make you amends.

William Shakespeare

Friendship makes prosperity more brilliant, and lightens adversity by dividing and sharing it.

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.

Thomas Jefferson

No human relation gives one possession in another—every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone.

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

It is virtue, virtue, which both creates and preserves friendship. On it depends harmony of interest, permanence, fidelity.

You've said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing," he was saying; "but you know that friendship's not what I want: that there's only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so…yes, love!…