Henri Nouwen:

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Gore Vidal:

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

George Washington:

Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

George Santayana:

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Persons and Places: The Middle Span, 1945

George Santayana:

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.

The Life of Reason, 1905-1906

George Eliot:

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

George Eliot:

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

Friedrich Nietzsche:

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld:

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

Francis David:

We need not think alike to love alike.

Francis Bacon:

There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.

Epicurus:

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.


3rd century BCE

Emily Dickinson:

Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen --
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs -- between --

Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you -- Nobody -- too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!

Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

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

Elizabeth Foley:

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart

Elie Wiesel:

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton:

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

Edgar Watson Howe:

When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.