Friendship quotes
Old writers took friendship seriously, sometimes more seriously than love. Here are their sayings about loyalty, good company and the friend who tells you the truth, chosen for being short enough to share.
The library has 955 quotes on this topic. Here are 60 of the most quoted, no more than four from any one writer.
60 friendship quotes
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Now, good digestion wait on appetite, And health on both!
William Shakespeare Macbeth, Act iii. Sc. 4 -
And do as adversaries do in law,—Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.
William Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew, Act i. Sc. 2 -
Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?
Confucius Analects, I.1 · translated by James Legge -
Small service is true service while it lasts. Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one: The daisy, by the shadow that it casts, Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.
William Wordsworth To a Child. Written in her Album -
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Friendship, Essays: First Series -
A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs; The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover rooted stays.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays. First Series. Epigraph to Friendship -
Among unequals what society Can sort, what harmony, or true delight?
John Milton Paradise Lost, Book viii. Line 383 -
Society is composed of two great classes—those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
Nicolas Chamfort Maxims and Thoughts, No. 113 · translated by William G. Hutchison -
He that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends.
William Shakespeare As You Like It, Act iii. Sc. 2 -
Society is a troop of thinkers, and the best heads among them take the best places.
Ralph Waldo Emerson The Conduct of Life -
Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.
Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock, Canto iii. Line 7 -
Sir, you are very welcome to our house: It must appear in other ways than words, Therefore I scant this breathing courtesy.
William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice, Act v. Sc. 1 -
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays. First Series. Friendship -
Renewed friendships require more care than those that have never been broken.
François de La Rochefoucauld Maxims (supplement), Supplement, CXXIV · translated by J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell -
The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they while their companions slept Were toiling upward in the night.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Ladder of Saint Augustine -
Up! up! my friend, and quit your books, Or surely you’ll grow double! Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks! Why all this toil and trouble?
William Wordsworth The Tables Turned -
He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack, For he knew when he pleas’d he could whistle them back.
Oliver Goldsmith Retaliation, Line 107 -
I would not enter on my list of friends (Though graced with polish’d manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
William Cowper The Task, Book vi. Winter Walk at Noon. Line 560 -
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
Mark Twain Following the Equator -
An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship. It starts in the right manner.
Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws?
Abraham Lincoln June 11 -
The face of an old friend is like a ray of sunshine through dark and gloomy clouds.
Abraham Lincoln January 27 -
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 Pudd’nhead Wilson -
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And days o’ lang syne?
Robert Burns Auld Lang Syne -
If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him you are his sincere friend.
Abraham Lincoln August 12 -
Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles. Have no friends not equal to yourself. When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.
Confucius Analects, IX.24 · translated by James Legge -
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
The Buddha Dhammapada, v. 78 · translated by F. Max Müller -
Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.
Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
There is an old-time toast which is golden for its beauty. “When you ascend the hill of prosperity may you not meet a friend.”
Mark Twain Following the Equator -
Praise from a friend, or censure from a foe, Are lost on hearers that our merits know.
Alexander Pope The Iliad of Homer, Book x. Line 293 -
Give me the avowed, the erect, the manly foe, Bold I can meet,—perhaps may turn his blow! But of all plagues, good Heaven, thy wrath can send, Save, save, oh save me from the candid friend!
George Canning New Morality -
We need not wonder; for a ball has been served him, and he must return it to his companion. He is occupied in catching it in its fall from the roof, to win a game.
Blaise Pascal Pensées, No. 140 · translated by W. F. Trotter -
Come what will, I will keep my faith with friend and foe.
Abraham Lincoln June 15 -
The best preservative to keep the mind in health is the faithful admonition of a friend.
Francis Bacon Essays -
Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants, but not always best subjects; for they are light to run away, and almost all fugitives are of that condition.
Francis Bacon Essays -
Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.
George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists -
It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness.
Francis Bacon Essays -
Death is a friend of ours, and he who is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
Francis Bacon Essays -
Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.
Blaise Pascal Pensées, No. 100 · translated by W. F. Trotter -
Jesus, seeing all His friends asleep and all His enemies wakeful, commits Himself entirely to His Father.
Blaise Pascal Pensées, No. 552 · translated by W. F. Trotter -
In the letter On Injustice can come the ridiculousness of the law that the elder gets all. “My friend, you were born on this side of the mountain, it is therefore just that your elder brother gets everything.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées, No. 291 · translated by W. F. Trotter -
Nothing is more disgraceful than a wolfish friendship false friendship.
Marcus Aurelius Meditations, Book XI.15 · translated by George Long -
Keep thyself then simple, good, pure, serious, free from affectation, a friend of justice, a worshipper of the gods, kind, affectionate, strenuous in all proper acts.
Marcus Aurelius Meditations, Book VI.30 · translated by George Long -
Man in society is like a flower Blown in its native bed; ’tis there alone His faculties expanded in full bloom Shine out; there only reach their proper use.
William Cowper The Task, Bk. iv., Line 659 -
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
Henry David Thoreau -
Every house was an inn, where all were welcomed and feasted.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Evangeline, Pt. I., iv., Line 15 -
When Xanthippe was chiding Socrates for making scanty preparation for entertaining his friends, he answered:—“If they are friends of ours they will not care for that; if they are not, we shall care nothing for them!”
Epictetus Golden Sayings, No. CLXXXI · translated by Hastings Crossley -
Friend, bethink you first what it is you would do, and then what your own nature is able to bear.
Epictetus Golden Sayings, No. CIV · translated by Hastings Crossley -
Consider what a man Socrates was when he dressed himself in a skin, after Xanthippe had taken his cloak and gone out, and what Socrates said to his friends who were ashamed of him and drew back from him when they saw him dressed thus.
Marcus Aurelius Meditations, Book XI.28 · translated by George Long -
Acquire money then, your friends say, that we also may have something.
Epictetus Enchiridion, ch. XXIV · translated by George Long -
Walk this world with no friend in it but God and St. Edmund, and you will either fall into the ditch or learn a good many things.
Thomas Carlyle Past and Present -
I am free, I am a friend of God, ready to render Him willing obedience.
Epictetus Golden Sayings, No. CXLIV · translated by Hastings Crossley -
How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true, otherwise impossible; except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league.
Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus -
There is an emanation from the heart in genuine hospitality which cannot be described but is immediately felt, and puts the stranger at once at his ease.
Washington Irving -
The Admiralty consequently ordered Captain Dayman, an old friend and shipmate of mine, to ascertain the depth over the whole line of the cable, and to bring back specimens of the bottom.
Thomas Henry Huxley Aphorisms and Reflections, No. CXCII -
When our friends have deceived us we owe them but indifference to the tokens of their friendship, yet for their misfortunes we always owe them pity.
François de La Rochefoucauld Maxims, Maxim 434 · translated by J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell -
The greatest effort of friendship is not to show our faults to a friend, but to show him his own.
François de La Rochefoucauld Maxims, Maxim 410 · translated by J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell -
We easily forgive in our friends those faults we do not perceive.
François de La Rochefoucauld Maxims, Maxim 428 · translated by J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell -
By doubt they are established, and open inquiry is their bosom friend.
Thomas Henry Huxley Aphorisms and Reflections, No. LXI