Quotes About Friendship

A Thousand Splendid Suns, the new book by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.

Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

For me, the phone remains miraculous in a way that electronic communication just isn't. A phone brings the voice of a friend. It's live. Email is a movie—once you get it, nothing you do will change it. A call is theater—surprising and unpredictable. What's more, your presence is essential.

Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind,

Crossing to Safety,

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

Wat had je eraan, alleen feiten in je hoofd te stampen en daarmee over de smerige straten van Amsterdam te sjokken, met studiegenoten die vol platvloerse politieke ideeën zaten, die nergens anders op uit waren dan hun leermeesters te treiteren, en, zonder te genieten van wat ze moesten leren, hun kille wrok met allerlei onzin bot te vieren?

But when Jim Curley needed something for the final uphill pull in his mayoralty race, Guy Currier knew where to find it, and when Malcolm Nichols ran on the Republican ticket, Currier was his friend; Nichols won. Such a man could not escape the admiration of Calvin Coolidge.

My old friends in the House{91} were gone. The Western Massachusetts Club, that had its headquarters in the Adams House where most of us lived that came from beyond the Connecticut, was inactive. The committees I had, except the chairmanship of agriculture, did not interest me greatly, and to crown my discontent the Democratic governor sent in a veto which the senate sustained, to a bill authorizing the New Haven Railroad to construct a trolley system in western Massachusetts.

While friends we were, the hot debates That rose 'twixt you and me! Now we are mere associates, And never disagree.

If he draw you aside from your proper end, No enemy like a bosom friend.

A true friend knows your weaknesses but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities.

We are social creatures; we will be miserable if we try to cut off contact with other people. Therefore, if what we seek is tranquility, we should form and maintain relations with others. In doing so, though, we should be careful about whom we befriend. We should also, to the extent possible, avoid people whose values are corrupt, for fear that their values will contaminate ours. •

Besides advising us to avoid people with vices, Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, "who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.

The Stoics fell somewhere between the Cyrenaics and the Cynics: They thought people should enjoy the good things life has to offer, including friendship and wealth, but only if they did not cling to these good things. Indeed, they thought we should periodically interrupt our enjoyment of what life has to offer to spend time contemplating the loss of whatever it is we are enjoying. Affiliating

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

Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache do be my enemy--for friendship's sake.

It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.

in a word, [they] did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully, without any grudging in the least, showing herein their true love unto their friends and brethren. A rare example and worthy to be remembered.

I want to tell my friends how beautiful / the world is. Not but what they know / it is terrible too--they know as well as I; / but nevertheless, I want to tell my friends. / Because they are. And this is what they are; / and because it is and this is what it is. / You are my friend. The world is beautiful. / Dear friend, you are. I want to tell you so.

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.

And I may dine at journey's endWith Landor and with Donne.

May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass, for such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend....

For such,Being made beautiful overmuch,Consider beauty a sufficient end,Lose natural kindness and maybeThe heart-revealing intimacyThat chooses right, and never find a friend.