Friendship and Friends Quotations

"A Friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Fate chooses your relations, you choose your friends."
-- Jacques Delille (1738–1813), French poet and abbot.

"Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go."
-- Margaret Walker (1915– ), U.S. poet, novelist, and journalist.

"Friends are God's apology for relations."
-- Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949), British writer, critic, and anthologist.

"Have no friends not equal to yourself."
-- Confucius (551 BC–479 BC), Chinese philosopher, administrator, and moralist.

"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere."
-- Ali ben Abi Taleb (?–660). Hundred Sayings (650?).

"I hate all that don't love me, and slight all that do."
-- George Farquhar (1678?–1707), Irish dramatist.

"I sought them far and found them,
The sure, the straight, the brave,
The hearts I lost my own to,
The souls I could not save
They braced their belts about them,
They crossed in ships the sea,
They sought and found six feet of ground,
And there they died for me."
-- A. E. Housman (1859–1936), British poet and scholar. Last Poems XXXII (1922).

"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 (1835–1910), U.S. writer and humorist.

"It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."
-- Toni Morrison (1931– ), U.S. novelist.
Beloved (1987).

"Job endured everything—until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient."
-- Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Danish philosopher.
Journal (1849).

"Nothing is there more friendly to a man than a friend in need."
-- Plautus (254? BC–184 BC), Roman comic playwright.

"Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest for his feet."
-- John Selden (1584–1654), English historian. Table Talk "Friends" (1689).

"The wicked can have only accomplices, the voluptuous have companions in debauchery, self-seekers have associates, the politic assemble the factions, the typical idler has connections, princes have courtiers. Only the virtuous have friends."
-- Voltaire (1694–1778), French writer and libertarian philosopher; Dictionnaire philosophique "Friendship" (1764).

"A bad neighbor is as great a misfortune as a good one is a great blessing."
-- Hesiod (lived 8th century BC), Greek poet; Theogony (J. Banks (tr.); 750? BC).

"A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
-- Francis Bacon (1561–1626), English philosopher, lawyer, and statesman; Essays "Of Friendship" (1625).

"A true bond of friendship is usually only possible between people of roughly equal status. This equality is demonstrated in many indirect ways, but it is reinforced in face-to-face encounters by a matching of the posture of relaxation or alertness."
-- Desmond John Morris (1928– ), British biologist and writer; Manwatching "Postural Echo" (1977).

"Always, Sir, set a high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord, will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you."
-- Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), British lexicographer and writer, May 1781; Quoted in: Life of Samuel Johnson (James Boswell; 1791).

"And much more am I sorrier for my good knights' loss than for the loss of my fair queen; for queens I might have enough, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company."
-- Thomas Malory (?–1471?), English writer, 1470; Le Morte d'Arthur (1485).

"Distance sometimes endears friendship, and absence sweeteneth it."
-- James Howell (1594?–1666), British writer, 1645-1655; Familiar Letters of James Howell (W. H. Bennett ed.; 1890).

"Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love."
-- William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English poet and playwright; Much Ado About Nothing (1598-1599), Act 2, Scene 1.

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."
-- C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), Irish-born British novelist; The Four Loves "Friendship" (1960).

"Friendships begin with liking or gratitude—roots that can be pulled up."
-- George Eliot (1819–1880), English novelist; Daniel Deronda (1876).