These quotes about friendship can paint a picture of what it’s like to have true friends. Read the insights from great writers and leaders. Please take your time with the quotes below.
Enjoy insights into one of the most important relationships in our lives: friendships.
Best Friendship Quotes
1.) Sometimes, you have to get to know someone really well to realize you’re really strangers.
Mary Richards, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”
2.) Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.
Oscar Wilde
3.) The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is the knack for getting along with people.
Theodore Roosevelt
4.) Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
5.) Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
6.) Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
Albert Camus
7.) Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
William Ellery Channing
8.) Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year.
Victor Borge
9.) Plant thou the tree of friendship only; so shall thy heart’s desire bear fruit: Uproot thou hatred’s plant completely, or woes unnumbered thence may shoot.
Hafiz
Good Friendship Quotes
10.) A friend in power is a friend lost.
Henry Adams
11.) Everybody forgets the basic thing: people are not going to love you unless you love them.
Pat Carroll
12.) We have a few friendships because we are not willing to pay the price of friendship.
Hugh Black
13.) A friend is a present you give yourself.
Unknown
14.) A friend whom you have been gaining during your whole life, you ought not to be displeased within a moment. A stone is many years becoming a ruby; take care that you do not destroy it in an instant against another stone.
Saadi
15.) We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses, there is, at last, one which makes the heart run over.
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
16.) It is a friendly heart that has plenty of friends.
Thackeray
17.) Friends’ quotes greatly add to friends’ birthday cards, notes, letters, texts, and emails. Share with your friends how you value their relationship.
Check out 101 Friendship Messages.
Interesting Insights on Friendship
18.) Your friend will argue with you.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, quoted in Newsweek, July 28, 1975
19.) Friends are born, not made.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
20.) Never explain – your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you anyhow.
Elbert Hubbard, The Motto Book, 1907
21.) It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties, we know they won’t save us any more than loved did.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up “Note-Books” (1945)
22.) I like people who complicate my life, but I always seem to pick the wrong ones.
Calvin Klein
23.) When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he’s nobody’s friend.
Theodore H. White, Interview in Newsweek, October 23, 1972
24.) Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass, and it goes to pieces.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Locked Rooms and Open Doors, 1974
25.) Why was it that everyone seemed to have more friends when they were kids than when they were adults?
Richard Price, Ladies’ Man, 1978
Looking for something on the funny side? Try our humorous friends’ quotes.
Short Friendship Quotes
26.) Friends come and go, and enemies linger.
Unknown
27.) Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.
Benjamin Franklin
28.) Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain
29.) A hedge between keeps friendship green.
Unknown
30.) Friendship is love without his wings!
Lord Byron
31.) The man who trust other men will make fewer mistakes than he who distrusts them.
Camillo Di Cavour
32.) Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
George Eliot
33.) Keep good men company, and you shall be of their number.
Unknown
34.) A friend is, as it were, a second self.
Cicero
35.) We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
36.) There is no hope or joy except in human relations.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Friendship Proverbs
37.) Hold a true friend with both of your hands.
Nigerian Proverb
38.) Life without a friend is death without a witness.
Spanish Proverb
39.) Friendship is honey, but don’t eat it all.
Morroccan Proverb
40.) Friendship is a furrow in the sand.
Tongan Proverb
41.) A friend is like a poem.
Persian Proverb
42.) A good friend comes uninvited.
German Proverb
43.) If you always live with those who are lame, you will yourself learn to limp.
Latin Proverb
44.) A breast friend is like a four-leaf clover, hard to find and lucky to have.
Irish Proverb
45.) None is so rich as to throw away a friend.
Turkish Proverb
46.) Friends and wine should be old.
Spanish Proverb
47.) Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
Portuguese Proverb
48.) Everybody’s friend is nobody’s friend.
French Proverb
49.) It’s easier to visit friends than to live with them.
Chinese Proverb
50.) A man becomes like those whose society he loves.
Hindu Proverb
Quotes About Friends
51.) Once let friendship be given that is born of God, nor time nor circumstance can change it to a lessening; it must be mutual growth, increasing trust, widening faith, enduring patience, forgiving love, unselfish ambition—an affection built before the Throne, that will bear the test of time and trial.
Allan Throckmorton
52.) Friendship’s an abstract of this noble flame,
‘Tis love refind and purged from all its dross,
‘Tis next to angels’ love, if not the same,
As strong in passion is, though not so gross.
Catherine Philips
53.) Friendship, peculiar boon of Heaven,
The noble mind’s delight and pride,
To men and angels only given,
To all the lower world denied.
Samuel Johnson
54.) O Friendship! thou divinest alchemist, that man should ever profane thee!
Douglas Jerrold
55.) Pure friendship is something which men of inferior intellect can never taste.
De la Bruyère
56.) Who talks of a common friendship? There is no such thing in the world. On earth, no word is more sublime. Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is. God is love.
Henry Drummond
57.) He that wrongs his friend
Wrongs himself more and ever bears about
A silent court of justice in his breast,
Himse,lf the judge and jury, and himself
The prisoner at the bar, evecondemned’d:
And that drags down his life.
Tennyson
58.) Golden friendship is not a common thing to be picked up in the street… There are pearls of the heart, which cannot be thrown to swine.
Hugh Black
Friendship Sayings
59.) Friendship is the marriage of the soul.
Voltaire
60.) The only rose without thorns is friendship.
Mlle. de Scuderi
61.) To the young friendship comes as the glory of spring, a very miracle of beauty, a mystery of birth: to the old, it has the bloom of autumn, beautiful still, but with the beauty of decay.
Hugh Black
62.) The pledge of Friendship! it is still divine,
Though watery floods have quenched its burning wine;
Whatever vase the sacred drops may hold,
The gourd, the shell, the cup of beaten gold,
Around its brim, the bond of Nature throws
A garland sweeter than the banquet’s rose.
W. Holmes
63.) Friend is a word of royal tone;
Friend is a poem all alone.
The Persian
64.) First on thy friend deliberate with thyself,
Pause, ponder, sift; not eager in the choice,
Nor jealous of the chosen: fixing, fix;—
Judge before friendship then confides till death.
Young
65.) The highest friendship must always lead us to the highest pleasure.
Fielding
Robert Browning Quotes
66.) Hand grasps hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, And great hearts expand And grow one in the sense of this world’s life.
67.) You’re my friend,
What a thing friendship is, world without end!
How it gives the heart and soul a stir up!
68.) There must be many a pair of friends
Who, arm in arm, deserve the warm
Moon-births and the long evening-ends.
So, for their sake, be May still May!
69.) What joy is better than the news of friends
Whose memories were a solace to me oft,
As mountain baths to wild fowls in their flight.
Emerson’s Quotes
70.) The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity, and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both.
71.) Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations, we come more worthily into nature.
72.) For perfect friendship, it may be said to require natures so rare and costly, so well tempered each, and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced that very seldom can its satisfaction be realized.
73.) A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
74.) Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built like a festal bower or arch to entertain him a single day.
75.) O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone, the sky is arched,
Through the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught.
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
More Emerson Quotations
76.) The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed: there is no winter and no night: all tragedies, all ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the preceding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons.
77.) Love shows me the opulence of nature by disclosing to me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every other direction.
78.) Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,
A poet or a friend to find;
Behold, he watches at the door,
Behold his shadow on the floor.
79.) Friendship demands a religious treatment. We must not be wilful; we must not provide. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it.
80.) Oh, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!
81.) My friends have come to me unsought; the great God gave them to me.
82.) A man’s friends are his magnetism.
83.) I do not wish to treat friendships daintily but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork but the solidest thing we know.
Longfellow Quotations
84.) I know and esteem you and feel that your nature is noble,
Lifting mine up to a higher, a more ethereal level,
Therefore I value your friendship.
85.) Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend.
86.) You will forgive me, I hope, for the sake of the friendship between us,
Which is too true and too sacred to be so easily broken!
Learn more about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Quotes about friendship can take several directions: warm, inspirational, appreciative, and more. Pick the right friendship quote for your needs.
Words on Friendship
87.) Friendship sealed by companionship in sin will not last long.
Arnot
88.) Who friendship with a knave hath made is judg’d a partner in the trade.
Gay
89.) Friendship requires a steady, constant, and unchangeable character, a person that is uniform in his intimacy.
Plutarch
90.) Eschew that friend, if thou art wise, who consorts with thy enemies.
Saadi
91.) The friends thou hast and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade.
Shakespeare
92.) To the world, you may be just one person, but to one person, you may be the world.
Brandi Snyde
93.) Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.
Publilius Syrus
94.) A good man is the best friend and, therefore, soonest to be chosen, longer to be retained, and, indeed, never to be parted with unless he ceases to be that for which he was chosen.
Jeremy Taylor
95.) He makes no friend who never made a foe.
Tennyson
Biblical Quotes
96.) Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
Proverbs 27:6
97.) Bad company corrupts good character.
1 Corinthians 15:33
98.) Ye are My friends; if ye do whatsoever, I command you.
John xv. 14
99.) His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.
Canticles v. 16
100.) He that loveth pureness of heart, for the grace of his lips the king shall be his friend.
Proverbs xxii. 11
Famous Quotes
101.) Friendship is love without his wings!
Byron
102.) Friendship is a word the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm.
Augustine Birrell
103.) They seem to take away the sun from the world who withdraw friendship from life.
Cicero
104.) True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
Colton
105.) Real friends are our greatest joy and our greatest sorrow.
Fénelon
106.) Friendship is the ideal; friends are the reality; reality always remains far apart from the ideal.
Joseph Roux
107.) Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
Henry D. Thoreau
108.) Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.
Shakespeare
109.) True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends but in the worth and choice.
Ben Johnson
Quotes on friends
110.) To have a friend is to have one of the sweetest gifts that life can bring: to be a friend is to have a solemn and tender education of soul from day today.
Anna R. Brown
111.) Friendship always benefits, while love sometimes injures.
Seneca
112.) Friendship is an allay of our sorrows, the ease of our passions, the discharge of our oppressions, the sanctuary to our calamities, the counselor of our doubts, the clarity of our minds, the emission of our thoughts, the exercise and improvement of what we meditate.
Jeremy Taylor
113.) He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, But he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
Oriental Proverb
114.) A friend who will not despise us for our weakness, nor disown us for our sinfulness, nor tire of us for being troublesome, nor scoff at us for our sensibility, but who will patiently hear our tale, fully understand our regret, tenderly recognize our stumbling-blocks, and be honest enough to tell us the truth, cost us what it may—oh, do you not see what a real help he might be to us.
Bishop Thorold
115.) A friend welded into our life is more to us than twice five thousand kinsmen, one in blood.
Euripides
116.) A friend loves to see you happy.
Unknown
117.) I have made it a rule never to be with a person for ten minutes without trying to make him happier.
Unknown
118) Be courteous to all but intimate with few, and let those be well-tried before you give them your confidence.
George Washington
Friendship Insights
119.) I used to think that friendship meant happiness, but I have learned that it means discipline.
Anna R. Brown
120.) Dear is my friend – yet from my foe, as from my friend comes good: My friend shows what I can do, and my foe what I should.
Schiller
121.) We can live without a brother, but not without a friend.
German Proverb
122.) Love is flower-like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.
Coleridge
123.) You shall perceive how you mistake my fortunes; I am wealthy in my friends.
Shakespeare
124.) A faithful friend is the medicine of life.
Ecclesiasticus
125.) In friendship, there is no commerce or business depending on the same, but itself.
Montaigne
126.) You must, therefore, love me, myself, and not my circumstances if we are to be real friends.
Cicero
127.) I can never think of promoting my convenience at the expense of a friend’s interest and inclination.
George Washington
128.) The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
Elisabeth Foley
Quotations on Being Friends
129.) Life is partly what we make it and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
Tennessee Wiliams
130.) Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you; spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.
Amy Poehler
131.) Don’t make friends who are comfortable to be with. Make friends who will force you to lever yourself up.
Thomas J. Watson
132.) Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.
Muhammad Ali
133.) A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.
Walter Winchell
134.) Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust
135.) A friend is one who overlooks your broken fence and admires the flowers in your garden.
Unknown
136.) There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.
Jim Henson
137.) When the world is so complicated, the simple gift of friendship is within all of our hands.
Maria Shriver
138.) True friends are never apart, maybe in distance but never in heart.
Helen Keller
139.) No friendship is an accident.
O. Henry
140.) Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense and to have her nonsense respected.
Charles Lamb
Why Can’t We Be Friends
141.) A friend can tell you things you don’t want to tell yourself.
Frances Ward Weller
142.) Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.
Oscar Wilde
143.) Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
Albert Camus
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By Liz Olson
Liz is a writer, fiction lover, and tennis player based in Minneapolis.
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