Quotes on Friendship

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take practice.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

The friendship which is to be practised or expected by common mortals, must take its rise from mutual pleasure, and must end when the power ceases of delighting each other.

The spirit in which a thing is given determines that in which the debt is acknowledged; it's the intention, not the face-value of the gift, that's weighed.

True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.

Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.

Friends are as companions on a journey, who ought to aid each other to persevere in the road to a happier life.

When someone asked Abraham Lincoln, after he was elected president, what he was going to do about his enemies, he replied, "I am going to destroy them. I am going to make them my friends."

Absent or dead, still let a friend be dear.

EXPOSTULATION, n. One of the many methods by which fools prefer to lose their friends.

Oh call it by some better name, For friendship sounds too cold.

My friend, when a man has anything to tell in this world, the difficulty is not to make him tell it, but to prevent him from telling it too often.

It's family, and it's faith, and it's friends, and it's not the glamour of the Presidency, or the wonder of going to receive the Nobel Prize. All those are important, of course. But maybe it's just that I'm 71 years old now. It's family, and it's faith, and it's friends. I would tell them that. Don't forget that. In your brilliance, don't turn your back on your friends. Don't think you're entitled to something, you're smarter than the next guy.

Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second - if there is one.

Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is always, therefore, represented as blind.

You complain, friend Swift, of the length of my epigrams, but you yourself write nothing. Yours are shorter.

Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my Friend.

As long as you are lucky, you will have many friends; if cloudy times appear, you will be alone. -Donec eris felix, multos numerabis amicos; tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expect everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate good. . . . If we will take the good we find, . . . we shall have heaping measures. . . .