One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.
Euripides

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Aristotle

“The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?”
Henry David Thoreau

But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.
Mohammed Ali

“I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.”
Walt Whitman

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”
Goethe

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
Mahatma Gandhi

“Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.” Mark Twain

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anaïs Nin

“Friendship is essentially a partnership.”
Aristotle

“True friendship’s laws are by this rule express’d, Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.”
Alexander Pope

Silence is the true friend that never betrays.
Confucius

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Henry David Thoreau

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
Aristotle

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.”
C.S. Lewis

“Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.”
Aristotle

All love that has not friendship for its base, Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.”
Epicurus

There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person’s eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living.
Don Marquis

“Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness…”
Richard Bach

“You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.”
Woodrow Wilson

It is difficult to say who do you the most mischief: enemies with the worst intentions or friends with the best.
E.R. Bulwer-Lytton

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.
Oscar Wilde

Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world.
Eleanor Roosevelt

“Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
Henry David Thoreau

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.
Katherine Mansfield

“A faithful friend is the medicine of life.”
Apocrypha

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking
George Eliot

“The making of friends, who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man’s success in life.”
Edward Everett Hale 

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
Henry David Thoreau

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
Henry Ward Beecher

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain

The bird a nest the spider a web the human friendship.
William Blake

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.
Thomas Jefferson

It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.
Zora Neale Hurston

“Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes

A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.
La Rochefoucauld

“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Mark Twain:

Friendship is to be purchased only by friendship. A man may have authority over others, but he can never have their hearts but by giving his own.
Thomas Wilson

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
Mohandas K. Gandhi

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make life entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.
Epicurus

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

The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.
Abraham Lincoln

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend
Robert Louis Stevenson

How does one keep from “growing old inside”? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people…. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.
Robert McAfee Brown

“Friends show their love in times of trouble…”
Euripides

We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.
Sir Francis Bacon

Always set 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

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.
Seneca