Quotes About Friendship

58 quotes

Two friends sit late at a table, one leaning in to say a hard thing the other needs to hear. Leonardo da Vinci asked for exactly this discipline: reprove your friend in secret and praise him in public. Socrates insisted that friends are won by sensible tokens of love, not by bare compliments. Nietzsche saw friends as brothers in distress, equals facing rivals, free men facing death. Sophocles warned that throwing away an honest friend is throwing away your life. John Paul II defined friendship as a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person's good. Augustine advised that when two strangers ask you to judge a dispute, you should accept, because you will gain one friend. Goethe noted that sometimes it is an act of friendship to write nothing rather than not to write.
American philosopher

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

— Essays: First Series

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

— The Picture of Dorian Gray

English author

There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.

— Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

German philosopher

One in three all friends are: Brothers in distress, equals facing rivals, free men - facing death!

— The Gay Science

English modernist writer

For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.

— The Waves

Author, novelist, writer

There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.

— Northanger Abbey

French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician

In love there are no friends everywhere where there is a pretty woman hostility is open.

— Les Misérables

British writer and journalist

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

— 1984

English writer and philologist

I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.

— The Return of the King

French novelist, critic and essayist

...we need to bear in mind that our opinion of other people, our ties with friends or family, have only the semblance of fixity and are, in fact, as eternally fluid as the sea.

— The Guermantes Way

Lebanese-American writer, poet, and painter

When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, asthe mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

— The Prophet

American author and journalist

Blood is thicker than water,"The young man said / As he knifed his friend / For a drooling old bitch / And a house full of lies.

— 88 Poems

English mystery and detective writer

There! Now we're friends!" declared the minx. "Say you're sorry about my sister -""I am desolated!""That's a good boy!

— The Murder on the Links

Greek philosopher

Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.

— The Nicomachean Ethics

Iranian poet

There is nothing I want but your presence. In friendship, time dissolves. Life is a cup. This connectionis pure wine. What else are cups for?I used to have twenty thousanddifferent desires.

— Bridge to the Soul: Journeys Into the Music and Silence of the Heart

US-British poet

Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended

— Murder in the Cathedral

German writer, artist, natural scientist and politician

But there are times," said Charlotte, "when it is necessary and an act of friendship to write nothing rather than not to write.

— Elective Affinities

French writer and aviator

People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.

— The Little Prince

Scottish novelist and poet

So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

— Lay Morals

British writer and physician

Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.

— Sherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Creeping Man

American writer and biochemist

The clown’s eyes sidled towards her, then drew away quickly. “But they kept me away from you earlier-and, on my word, you may laugh, but I was lonely for missing friendship.

— Foundation and Empire

French novelist and playwright

If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.

— Père Goriot