Friendship Quotes

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Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

Though flattery blossoms like friendship, yet there is a vast difference in the fruit.

He removes the greatest ornament of friendship who takes away from it respect.

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

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

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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..."

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

How few friendships would be lasting if we knew what our best friends say of us in our absence.

The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.

Abraham Lincoln

The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied.

Bertrand Russell

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Few friendships would remain, if each knew what his friend said of him when he wasn't there.

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.