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 the insights on one of the most important relationships in our lives: friendships.
Best Friendship Quotes
We have a few friendships because we are not willing to pay the price of friendship.
Hugh Black
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
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
Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
William Ellery Channing
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
The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is the knack for getting along with people.
Theodore Roosevelt
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
It is a friendly heart that has plenty of friends.
Thackeray
Friends’ quotes make great additions to friends’ birthday cards, notes, letters, texts, and emails. Share with your friends how you value their relationship.
Check out 101 Friendship Messages.
Quotes About Friends
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
Friendship’s an abstract of this noble flame,
‘Tis love refin’d, 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
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
O Friendship! thou divinest alchemist, that man should ever profane thee!
Douglas Jerrold
Pure friendship is something which men of inferior intellect can never taste.
De la Bruyère
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
He that wrongs his friend
Wrongs himself more and ever bears about
A silent court of justice in his breast,
Himself the judge and jury, and himself
The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn’d:
And that drags down his life.
Tennyson
Friendship Sayings
Friendship is the marriage of the soul.
Voltaire
The only rose without thorns is friendship.
Mlle. de Scuderi
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
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
Friend is a word of royal tone;
Friend is a poem all alone.
The Persian
Quotes life encourages us to learn – being able to quote appropriately is the sign of an educated person (some say).
Thick waters show no images of things;
Friends are each other’s mirrors and should be
Clearer than crystal, or the mountain-springs,
And free from clouds, design, or flattery.
For vulgar souls no part of friendship share;
Poets and friends are born to what they are.
Catherine Philips
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
The highest friendship must always lead us to the highest pleasure.
Fielding
Robert Browning Quotes
Hand grasps hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, And great hearts expand And grow one in the sense of this world’s life.
Robert Browning
You’re my friend,
What a thing friendship is, world without end!
How it gives the heart and soul a stir up!
Robert Browning
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!
Robert Browning
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.
Robert Browning
Emerson Quotes On Friends
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.
Emerson
Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations, we come more worthily into nature.
Emerson
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.
Emerson
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Emerson
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.
Emerson
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone, the sky is arched,
Through thee 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.
Emerson
More Emerson Quotations
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.
Emerson
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.
Emerson
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.
Emerson
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.
Emerson
Oh, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!
Emerson
My friends have come to me unsought; the great God gave them to me.
Emerson
A man’s friends are his magnetism.
Emerson
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.
Emerson
Longfellow Quotations On Friendship
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.
Longfellow
Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend.
Longfellow
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!
Longfellow
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
Friendship sealed by companionship in sin will not last long.
Arnot
Who friendship with a knave hath made is judg’d a partner in the trade.
Gay
Friendship requires a steady, constant, and unchangeable character, a person that is uniform in his intimacy.
Plutarch
Eschew that friend, if thou art wise, who consorts with thy enemies.
Saadi
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
To the world, you may be just one person, but to one person, you may be the world.
Brandi Snyde
Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.
Publilius Syrus
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
He makes no friend who never made a foe.
Tennyson
Biblical Quotes
Ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.
John xv. 14
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
He that loveth pureness of heart, for the grace of his lips the king shall be his friend.
Proverbs xxii. 11
Famous Quotes About Friendship
Friendship is love without his wings!
Byron
Friendship is a word the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm.
Augustine Birrell
They seem to take away the sun from the world who withdraw friendship from life.
Cicero
True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
Colton
Real friends are our greatest joy and our greatest sorrow.
Fénelon
Friendship is the ideal; friends are the reality; reality always remains far apart from the ideal.
Joseph Roux
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
Henry D. Thoreau
Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.
Shakespeare
True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends but in the worth and choice.
Ben Jonson
Friendship, mysterious cement of the soul,
Sweetener of life, and solder of society,
I owe thee much: thou hast deserv’d from me
Far, far beyond what I can ever pay.
Blair
Not all the works of Science, Art,
Or Genius in this world are worth
One genuine sigh that from the heart
Friendship or Love draws freshly forth.
Thomas Moore
Quotes on friends
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
Friendship always benefits, while love sometimes injures.
Seneca
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
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, But he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
Oriental Proverb
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
A friend welded into our life is more to us than twice five thousand kinsmen, one in blood.
Euripides
A friend loves to see you happy.
Unknown
I have made it a rule never to be with a person ten minutes without trying to make him happier.
Unknown
Be courteous to all but intimate with few, and let those be well-tried before you give them your confidence.
George Washington
Looking for something on the funny side? Try our humorous friends’ quotes.
Friendship Sayings
I used to think that friendship meant happiness: I have learnt that it means discipline.
Anna R. Brown
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
We can live without a brother, but not without a friend.
German Proverb
Love is flower-like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.
Coleridge
You shall perceive how you mistake my fortunes; I am wealthy in my friends.
Shakespeare
A faithful friend is the medicine of life.
Ecclesiasticus
In friendship, there is no commerce or business depending on the same, but itself.
Montaigne
You must, therefore, love me, myself, and not my circumstances if we are to be real friends.
Cicero
I can never think of promoting my convenience at the expense of a friend’s interest and inclination.
George Washington
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By Liz Olson
Liz is a writer, fiction lover, and tennis player based in Minneapolis.
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