Topic

Friendship

Shakespeare's observation that a friend never grows old in your eyes sits near Aristotle's claim that friendship is a slow-ripening fruit — the two poles of the collection. Byron calls it love without wings; Holmes calls it a breathing rose. Hubbard gives the best single definition: the friend who knows everything about you and still likes you. Seneca notes that the comfort of having had a friend cannot be taken away even after loss. La Bruyère offers the cold version: love and friendship exclude each other. Adams says friends are born, not made. The collection earns its claim that friendship is the most underrated form of love — it produces the most durable happiness and demands the most clear-eyed affection.

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The language of friendship is not words but meanings

Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud

Source: The Spectator, no. 225 (1711)

Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does

Source: Emma (1815)

Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend

Source: The New England Tragedies, John Endicott (1868)

All for one, one for all.

Source: The Three Musketeers (1844)

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit

A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

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

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends

Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman

A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship

Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them

Think where mans glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.