Friendship Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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

William Shakespeare

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.

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.

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Eleanor Roosevelt

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends; for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?

William Shakespeare

When anything is in the presence of evil, but is not as yet evil, the presence of good arouses the desire of good in that thing; but the presence of evil, which makes a thing evil, takes away the desire and friendship of the good; for that which was once both good and evil has now become evil only, and the good has no friendship with evil.

In true friendship, in which I am expert, I give myself to my friend more than I draw him to me. I not only like doing him good better than having him do me good, but also would rather have him do good to himself than to me; he does me most good when he does himself good.

Michel de Montaigne

Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.

It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.

Arthur Conan Doyle

We can build a society grounded on friendship and our common humanity - a society founded on tolerance. That is the only road open to us.

Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.

It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men - so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two agnostics. "I say God is One," and "I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.

G. K. Chesterton