When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick, - no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time.
Emerson
So, if I live or die to serve my friend,
’Tis for my love,—’tis for my friend alone,
And not for any rate that friendship bears
In heaven or on earth.
George Eliot
Old friends are the only ones whose hold is upon our inmost being; others but half replace them.
Voltaire
True friends appear less mov’d than counterfeit.
Horace
It is sublime to feel and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him; we need not reënforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance; I rely on him as on myself; if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.
Emerson
A true Friendship is as wise as it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no other law but kindness.
Henry D. Thoreau
Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat or violence or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious stones never.
Landor
Friendship’s the wine of life.
Young
Give me the avow’d, the erect, the manly foe;
Bold I can meet, perhaps may turn his blow;
But of all plagues, good Heaven, thy wrath can send,
Save, save, oh! save me from the candid friend.
George Canning
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
Henry D. Thoreau
Common friendships will admit of division; one may love the beauty of this, the good humor of that person, the liberality of a third, the paternal affection of a fourth, the fraternal love of a fifth, and so on. But this friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and sways with an absolute sovereignty, can admit of no rival.
Montaigne
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Coleridge
We love everything on our own account; we even follow our own taste and inclination when we prefer our friends to ourselves; and yet it is this preference that alone constitutes true and perfect friendship.
La Rochefoucauld
Friendships begin with liking or gratitude.
George Eliot
In friendship I early was taught to believe.
Byron
In all thy humors, whether grave or mellow
Thou’rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow,
Hast so much wit and mirth and spleen about thee,
That there’s no living with thee, or without thee.
Addison
Friendship of itself a holy tie,
Is made more sacred by adversity.
Dryden
Love and friendship exclude one another.
La Bruyère
Friendship is a severe sentiment, solidly seated, since it rests upon all that is highest in us, the purely intellectual part of us. What happiness to be able to say all that one feels to someone who comprehends one to the very end and not only up to a certain point, to someone who completes one’s thought with the same word that was on one’s lips, someone the reply of whom starts from one a torrent of conceptions, a flood of ideas!
Pierre Loti
The man that hails you Tom or Jack,
And proves by thumps upon your back
How he esteems your merit,
Is such a friend that one had need
Be very much his friend indeed
To pardon or to bear it.
Cowper
Judge before friendship, then confide till death.
Young
Have no friend not equal to yourself.
Confucius
