TO MY FRIENDS

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
~William Shakespeare

Love is like the wild-rose briar;
Friendship is like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?
~Emily Brontë

Yes we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check her diary when we arrange to meet. ~Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, 1992

Friendship isn't a big thing - it's a million little things. ~Author Unknown

Friends are kisses blown to us by angels. ~Author Unknown

A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world. ~Leo Buscaglia

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty. ~Sicilian Proverb

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature. ~Abraham Lincoln

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. ~Albert Schweitzer

A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they're not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they're not so bad. ~Arnold H. Glasgow

The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Notebook, 1927

A good friend is cheaper than therapy. ~Author Unknown

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend. ~Henry David Thoreau

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down. ~Arnold Glasow

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend. ~William Blake

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human. ~George Santayana

A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails. ~Donna Roberts

You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job. ~Laurence J. Peter

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. ~C.S. Lewis

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. ~Virginia Woolf

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind. ~Toni Morrison, Beloved

The friend within the man is that part of him which belongs to you and opens to you a door which never, perhaps, is opened to another. Such a friend is true, and all he says is true; and he loves you even if he hates you in other mansions of his heart. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert


A real friend is someone who would feel loss if you jumped on a train, or in front of one. ~Author Unknown

True friends stab you in the front. ~Oscar Wilde

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. ~William Blake

The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate

Friendship is Love, without his wings. ~Lord Byron, L'Amitié est l'Amour sans Ailes

The best time to make friends is before you need them. ~Ethel Barrymore

A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself. ~Frances Ward Weller

There is magic in long-distance friendships. They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound. ~Diana Cortes

Probably no man ever had a friend that he did not dislike a little. ~E.W. Howe

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul. ~Edith Wharton

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue. ~Alice Duer Miller

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive. ~Anäis Nin

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces. ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better. ~Plutarch

Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming. ~William Hazlitt

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson