Friendship Quote

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
- Margaret Mead 

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
- Alice Miller 

In the spiritual life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends.
- James Ishmael Ford 

We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.
- Letty Cottin Pogrebin 

How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
- Henry David Thoreau 

Nobody sees a flower -- really -- it is so small it takes time -- we haven't time -- and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
- Georgia O'Keeffe 

The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
- Francis Bacon 

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
- Karl Menninger 

Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality.
- Rowan D. Williams 

We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.
- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama 

There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person's eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living.
- Don Marquis


The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
- Elizabeth Foley 

We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy.
- Arthur Ashe 

If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh 

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
- George Eliot 

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
- Bertrand Russell 

Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back. 
- Blaise Pascal 

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
- Albert Camus 

There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
- Rollo May 

Friendship is a sheltering tree.
- Samuel Coleridge 

True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.
- Ben Jonson 

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
- Marcel Proust 

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 

You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.
- Indira Gandhi 

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
- E. M. Forster 

We all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.
- Margaret Guenther 


The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
- Rachel Naomi Remen 

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
- Mohandas K. Gandhi 

The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
- Mark Twain 

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 

All love that has not friendship for its base,Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox 

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance.
- Rabindranath Tagore 

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
- Rachel Carson 

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.
- Simone Weil 

How does one keep from "growing old inside"? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people…. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.
- Robert McAfee Brown

  When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.  
W. Somerset Maugham 

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere. 
Ali ibn-Abi-Talib 

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends. 
Aristotle 

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. 
Aristotle 

A good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling. 
Arthur Brisbane

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. 
Carl Jung

Friendship make prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it. 
Cicero 

The shifts of Fortune test the reliability of friends. 
Cicero 

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

Being friendless taught me how to be a friend. Funny how that works. 
Colleen Wainwright

Have no friends not equal to yourself. 
Confucius

Do not protect yourself by a fence, but rather by your friends. 
Czech Proverb 

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. 
Dale Carnegie 

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia. 
Dame Edna Everage 

You're supposed to trust friends. You have no reason to be his friend? That is part of the pleasure of friendship: trusting without absolute evidence and then being rewarded for that trust. 
David Shore

Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway. 
Elbert Hubbard 

Nothing changes your opinion of a friend so surely as success - yours or his. 
Franklin P. Jones

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation. 
George Washington 

Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. 
Georgia O'Keeffe 

All people want is someone to listen. 
Hugh Elliott

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

When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends. 
Japanese Proverb 

Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren't bad people; they're just acquaintances. 
Jay Leno 

In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends. 
John Churton Collins 

True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions. 
Joseph Addison 

There is nothing like the razor sharp tongue of a good friend to cut through the lies we tell ourselves. 
Laura Moncur

You don’t get to pick your own nickname. They’ve gotta give you one. It’s like we’re all tryin’ to make pets out of each other and we’re not comfortable unless we get to name ‘em. 
Laura Moncur

It isn't kind to cultivate a friendship just so one will have an audience. 
Lawana Blackwell

A good friend of my son's is a son to me. 
Lois McMaster Bujold

Adversity does teach who your real friends are. 
Lois McMaster Bujold

If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back. 
Lois McMaster Bujold 

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit. 
Aristotle 

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of. 
Sarah Orne Jewett 

You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job. 
Laurence J. Peter 

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
- Alice Walker 

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"
- Simone Weil 

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
- E. B. White 

Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes.
- Unknown 

Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.
- It's a Wonderful Life 

Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
- Unknown