Abandoning Friendship Quotes & Sayings

The realization that friendship is greater than love doesn't come when you have real and honest friends around. You realize it when someone whom you have always thought of as a friend, back stabs you. When a friend breaks your trust it hurts more than a lover abandoning you and then you realize friendship is indeed greater than love... While you are still figuring out the depth of your emotional connectivity, the ones who say they would never leave you, have already left. Unfaithful love does breaks heart but an unworthy friend bruises your soul. — SAMi

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship. — Marcel Proust

Exemplary friendship embraces, in a resolutely unrequited way, an unwearied capacity for loving generously without being loved back. Marking the limit of possibility - the friend need not be there - this structure recapitulates in fact the Aristotelian values according to which acts and states of loving are preferred to the condition of being-loved, which depends for its vigor on a mere potentiality. Being loved by your friend just pins you to passivity. For Aristotle, loving on the contrary, constitutes an act. To the extent that loving is moved by a kind of disclosive energy, it puts itself out there, shows up for the other, even where the other proves to be a rigorous no-show. Among other things, loving has to be declared and known, and thus involves an element of risk for the one who loves and who, abandoning any guarantee of reciprocity, braves the consequences when naming that love. — Avital Ronell