The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
- Francis Bacon
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
- Henry David Thoreau
Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality.
- Rowan D. Williams
We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.
- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
- Elizabeth Foley
We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy.
- Arthur Ashe
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
- George Eliot
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
- Bertrand Russell
Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.
- Blaise Pascal
Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
- Albert Camus
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
- Samuel Coleridge
True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.
- Ben Jonson
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen --
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs -- between --
- Emily Dickinson
It is virtue, virtue, which both creates and preserves friendship. On it depends harmony of interest, permanence, fidelity.
- Cicero
It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
- Marlene Dietrich
Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
- George Washington
To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
- Theodore H. White
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
