The Nature Of Friendship Quotes & Sayings

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

War was so many things, and not the least of which confusion. What was wrong? What was right, for that matter?
Was killing right or wrong? Brave or cowardly? Human nature or unnatural behavior of creatures too smart for their own good?
Loyalty, betrayal, hate, love, fear, friendship, teamwork, violence. War was connected to all of these. Hard work, sadness, suffering, discipline, chaos, questions, few answers, strategy, bravery, foolishness, death, life.
And both winning and losing were only two small aspects of the word war. — Kenzie Kovacs-Szabo

The longer they were together the more doubtful seemed the nature of his regard, and sometimes for a few painful minutes she believed it to be no more than friendship — Jane Austen

True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, in the enjoyment of one's self, and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions. — Joseph Addison

Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word. — Ian McEwan

Who can estimate the real wealth that inheres in a fine character ... How base and mean money and huge estates look in comparison. All other things fade before it. Its touch is like magic to win friendship, influence, power. Can you afford to chill, to discourage, to crush out of your life this sweet, sensitive plant, which would flower in your nature and give added glory to your life, for the sake of a few dollars, a little questionable fame? — Orison Swett Marden

His wild and enthusiastic imagination was chastened by the sensibility of his heart. His soul overflowed with ardent affections, and his friendship was of that devoted and wondrous nature that the worldly-minded teach us to look for only in the imagination. But even human sympathies were not sufficient to satisfy his eager mind. The scenery of external nature, which others regard only with admiration, he loved with ardour[...] — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, bur raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

God has written in the law of nature that when two people are joined in love or friendship, one must always give his heart more perfectly than the other. — George Sand

Senses of humor define people, as factions, deeper rooted than religious or political opinions. When carrying out everyday tasks, opinions are rather easy to set aside, but those whom a person shares a sense of humor with are his closest friends. They are always there to make the biggest influence. — Criss Jami

That is the honest nature of friendship. That is when it becomes sincere, and not self-serving. — R.A. Salvatore

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet: he it is who makes the truest use of the pine-who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane ... — Henry David Thoreau

No, the point of this story is that there are only a select few friends, past or present, that I would go to such lengths to stand by. That's what school really taught me: the enduring nature of friendship. How special it is to grow up and share a history with someone. As I've gotten older, friendships rooted in childhood feel even richer and more irreplaceable. — Connor Franta

Really to believe in human nature while striving to know the thousand forces that warp it from its ideal development-to call for and expect much from men and women, and not to be disappointed
and embittered if they fall short- to try to do good with people rather than to them- this is my religion on its human side. And if God exists, I think that he must be in the warm sun, in the kindly actions of the people we know and read of, in the beautiful things of art and nature, and in the closeness of friendships. — Randolph Bourne

I fell over twice. It was loud. The garden was black outside our circle of light. The endless night stretched all around us, so we told each other that we had to be close together, together in the dark. — Laure Eve

If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion — Boethius

If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity.
If there's no relationship with nature then you become a killer;
then you kill baby seals, whales, dolphins, and man
either for gain, for "sport," for food, or for knowledge.
Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty.
You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places
but you are a killer and so lose their friendship.
You probably are not related to anything to your wife or your husband. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Science will never be able to reduce the value of a sunset to arithmetic. Nor can it reduce friendship to formula. Laughter and love, pain and loneliness, the challenge of beauty and truth: these will always surpass the scientific mastery of nature. — Louis Orr

It is part of the business of life to be affable and pleasing to those whom either nature, chance or circumstance has made our companions. — Thomas More

But if love and friendship are weaknesses, they are basic human weaknesses: by which I mean that they are weaknesses so endemic to our nature that if one seeks, as the Stoics urge, to avoid being subject to them, one is likely to to get oneself into a worse position than one would be in if one simply accepted the weakness in oneself. The tendency towards, the need for, the various affections of love and friendship may be basic weaknesses in this sense because if one attempts to be utterly free of them, one will simply cover up one's needs and feelings and in the process give them free rein for subterranean mischief and eventual destructive effect within one's life. — Michael Slote

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling? The reason is clearly that the human heart as modern civilisation has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied, because it feels deply, perhaps even unconsciously, that it has somehow missed the meaning of life, that perhaps others, but not we ourselves, have secured the good things which nature offers man's enjoyment. — Bertrand Russell

Paul Otremba's remarkable first book, The Currency, is an intriguing foray into lyric epistemology that tries to come to ter ms with the implacable, paradox-ridden nature of knowledge and experience. These are deeply felt, deeply meditated poems guided by a sensibility highly attenuated to the physical world. In their openness to friendship and love and in their fearless directness, they remind me of the work of Larry Levis and Jon Anderson. Like Levis and Anderson, Otremba promises to be an influential and important voice for his generation. — Michael Collier

The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

People prefer to be with people like themselves. For all the celebration of 'diversity,' it's sameness that dominates. Most people favor friendship with those who have similar backgrounds, interests and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations, and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is nearly universal. It's human nature. — Robert J. Samuelson

If a man should ascend alone into heaven and behold clearly the structure of the universe and the beauty of the stars, there would be no pleasure for him in the awe-inspiring sight, which would have filled him with delight if he had had someone to whom he could describe what he had seen. Nature abhors solitude. — Marco Tulliio Cicerone

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character. — George Eliot

What, then, is marriage for? It is for helping each other to become our future glory-selves, the new creations that God will eventually make us. The common horizon husband and wife look toward is the Throne, and the holy, spotless, and blameless nature we will have. I can think of no more powerful common horizon than that, and that is why putting a Christian friendship at the heart of a marriage relationship can lift it to a level that no other vision for marriage approaches. — Timothy Keller

I'm determined that I won't give up on my dreams for anything. I have evolved in these years. Learned and outgrown a lot many things including the unrealistic expectations of my family,fake relationships,society's criticism,surpassed people who are intimidated by my outspoken nature, Faux friends and especially the people who disappear in dark whenever they think its easier for them to do so. I have grown over stupid and useless conversations. The insecurity and the feeling of self doubt. I have never been less burdened. — Parul Wadhwa

To elude nature, to refuse her friendship, and attempt to leap the river of life in the hope of finding God on the other side, is the common error of a perverted mysticality. It is as fatal in result as the opposite error of deliberately arrested development, which, being attuned to the wonderful rhythms of natural life, is content with this increase of sensibility; and, becoming a "nature-mystic," asks no more. — Evelyn Underhill

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success. — Oscar Wilde

To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man. — Edgar Allan Poe

Just as soon as I meet and learn to love a friend we must part and go our separate ways, never to meet on quite the same ground again. For, disguise the fact as we will, when friends, even the closest-and perhaps the more so on account of that very closeness-meet again after a separation there is always a chill, lesser or greater, of change. Neither finds the other quite the same. This is only natural. Human nature is ever growing or retrograding-never stationary. But still, with all our philosophy who of us can repress a little feeling of bewildered disappointment when we realize that our friend is not and never can be just the same as before-even although the change may be an improvement? — L.M. Montgomery

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money. — Mark Twain

Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was by nature someone who carried others. I didn't think he knew how to act or even how to feel as the object of help. — John Knowles

He showed the fineness of his nature by being kinder to me after that misunderstanding than before. Nay, the very incident which, by my theory, must in some degree estrange me and him, changed, indeed, somewhat our relations; but not in the sense I painfully anticipated. An invisible, but a cold something, very slight, very transparent, but very chill: a sort of screen of ice had hitherto, all through our two lives, glazed the medium through which we exchanged intercourse. Those few warm words, though only warm with anger, breathed on that frail frost-work of reserve; about this time, it gave note of dissolution. I think from that day, so long as we continued friends, he never in discourse stood on topics of ceremony with me. — Charlotte Bronte

I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in. — Pat Conroy

I really like the thing called friendship. And I think the most fulfilling kind of friendship is the one that you stumble quite randomly upon. Unexpected and unknown. You can learn a lot about yourself from these kinds of friendships, and some last a long time while others last only for the duration of time that you have together! But then I wonder, is the length of a friendship measured by the time you are given to spend within each others' company? Or is it measured by how long into the future you can look back at the photos you took, look back and replay the adventures and the laughter in your head; still feeling like it was one of the "bestest" times of your life? Because if it's the latter, I have a thousand friends! — C. JoyBell C.

For, when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of character, the most solid enjoyment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers ... of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good ... They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found ... This is the meaning of the riddle of the improbable philosopher-kings. They have a true community that is exemplary for all other communities. — Allan Bloom

And then to my surprise in one of them I discovered the original manuscript of On Friendship. Puzzled, I unrolled it, thinking I must have brought it with me by mistake. But when I saw that Cicero had copied out at the top of the roll in his shaking hand a quotation from the text, on the importance of having friends, I realised it was a parting gift: If a man ascended into heaven and gazed upon the whole workings of the universe and the beauty of the stars, the marvellous sight would give him no joy if he had to keep it to himself. And yet, if only there had been someone to describe the spectacle to, it would have filled him with delight. Nature abhors solitude. — Robert Harris

Adolescence is the time to enlarge the natural sentiments of pity, friendship, and generosity, the time to develop an understanding of human nature and the varieties of human character, the time to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of all men and to study the history of mankind. — Louise J. Kaplan

As surely as the sunset in my latest November
shall translate me to the ethereal world,
and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth;
as surely as the last strain of music which falls on my decaying ear
shall make age to be forgotten,
or, in short, the manifold influences of nature
survive during the term of our natural life,
so surely my Friend shall forever be my Friend,
and reflect a ray of God to me,
and time shall foster and adorn and consecrate our Friendship,
no less than the ruins of temples. — Henry David Thoreau

There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees. It argues, I think, a sweet and generous nature to have his strong relish for the beauties of vegetation, and this friendship for the hardy and glorious sons of the forest. He who plants a tree looks forward to future ages, and plants for posterity. Nothing could be less selfish than this. — Washington Irving

I had been poor myself, and knew what awaited him in the world. He would find that they who fawned on him most would be first to turn their backs on him now. He would be rudely disillusioned regarding the fables of love and friendship, and would become cynical, bitter, and sceptical of there being any disinterested good in human nature. — Miles Franklin

That men of this kind despise women, though a not uncommon belief, is one which hardly appears to be justified. Indeed, though naturally not inclined to 'fall in love' in this direction, such men are by their nature drawn rather near to women, and it would seem that they often feel a singular appreciation and understanding of the emotional needs and destinies of the other sex, leading in many cases to a genuine though what is called 'Platonic' friendship. There is little doubt that they are often instinctively sought after by women, who, without suspecting the real cause, are conscious of a sympathetic chord in the homogenic which they miss in the normal man. — Edward Carpenter

When my submission has been claimed, no longer in the name of love and friendship but by reason of some right or power, I have drawn upon the strength that is buried in my nature, I have straightened my shoulders and thrown off the yoke. I alone know the latent force hidden within me. I alone know how much I grieve and suffer and love. - George Sand — Elizabeth Berg

And so, though Smith was not at all the man Knight would have deliberately chosen as a friend - or even for one of a group of a dozen friends - he somehow was his friend. Circumstance, as usual, did it all. How many of us can say of our most intimate alter ego, leaving alone friends of the outer circle, that he is the man we should have chosen, as embodying the net result after adding up all the points in human nature that we love, and principles we hold, and subtracting all that we hate? The man is really somebody we got to know by mere physical juxtaposition long maintained, and was taken into our confidence, and even heart, as a makeshift. — Thomas Hardy

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son
and father. This villain of mine comes under the
prediction; there's son against father: the king
falls from bias of nature; there's father against
child. We have seen the best of our time:
machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall
lose thee nothing; do it carefully. And the
noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
offence, honesty! 'Tis strange. — William Shakespeare

A tree is made to live in peace in the color of day and in friendship with the sun, the wind and the rain. Its roots plunge in thefat fermentation of the soil, sucking in its elemental humors, its fortifying juices. Trees always seem lost in a great tranquil dream. The dark rising sap makes them groan in the warm afternoons. A tree is a living being that knows the course of the clouds and presses the storms because it is full of birds' nests. — Jacques Roumain

Much like books, she could tell how voiceless things had provided a brand of companionship more compatible to his nature than human friendship had ever been. These things, locked in their inanimate ways, fed him ideas, she thought. They whispered their tales to him through unmoving lips and he listened, opening himself to their world so much more than any normal passerby. That much was evident in the way he'd taken the photos, as if he'd caught each soulless thing in a candid moment of secret animation. Like they'd sensed him coming and so turned themselves his way because they knew that he held the power to translate their silence into words. — Kelly Creagh

There is nothing in the world more valuable than friendship. Those who banish it from their lives remove as it were the sun from the earth, because of all of nature's gifts, it is the most beautiful and the most pleasing. — Robin S. Sharma

Should a traveler, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted, men who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge, who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit, we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood and prove him a liar with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies. — David Hume

Some believers accuse skeptics of having nothing left but a dull, cold, scientific world. I am left with only art, music, literature, theatre, the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit, sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination, dreams, oceans, mountains, love, and the wonder of birth. That'll do for me. — Lynne Kelly

A lonely human we think is lonely.
Freakin thoughts surround it.
A lonely bird we think is lonely.
Damn! Did you see!
The giant nature around it.
Disrespectful of nature if we be,
lonely are only we. — Chetan M. Kumbhar

Diyar-e-Ishq Mein Apna Maqam Paida Kar,
Naya Zamana, Naye Subah-o-Sham Paida Kar;

Khuda Agar Dil-e-Fitrat Shanas De Tujh Ko,
Sakoot-e-Lala-o-Gul Se Kalaam Paida Kar;

Mera Tareeq Ameeri Nahin, Faqeeri Hai,
Khudi Na Baich, Ghareebi Mein Naam Paida Kar

Build in love's empire your hearth and your home;
Build Time anew, a new dawn, a new eve!

Your speech, if God give you the friendship of Nature,
From the rose and tulip's long silence weave

The way of the hermit, not fortune, is mine;
Sell not your soul! In a beggar's rags shine. — Muhammad Iqbal

Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher's stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship. — Mary Wollstonecraft

I hate you, I thought, I hate you with your bloody nature-boy airs and your bloody forced-march voyage of bloody discovery. I wondered then if Finn's personality worked on everyone, or whether I had just the the right sort of mentality to fall in step with a self-centered hermit-boy crab murderer. — Meg Rosoff

Pythagoras was the first to introduce vegetarianism to the West. It is of profound depth for man to learn how to live in friendship with nature, in friendship with creatures. That becomes the foundation. And only on that foundation can you base your prayer, your meditativeness. You can watch it in yourself: when you eat meat, meditation will be found to be more and more difficult. — Rajneesh

There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship, and nail him down to a table, and dissect him alive to show you the mezaraic veins ... Answer me, Machinist, has Nature really arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering? — Voltaire

When one reads, and re-reads, Moby Dick, it seems to me that one gets a more convincing, a more definite, impression of the man than from anything one may learn of his life and circumstances; an impression of a man endowed by nature with a great gift blighted by an evil genius, so that, like the agave, no sooner had it put forth its splendid blooming than it withered; a moody, unhappy man tormented by instincts he shrank from with horror; a man conscious that the virtue had gone out of him, and embittered by failure and poverty; a man of heart craving for friendship, only to find that friendship too was vanity. Such, as I see him, was Herman Melville, a man whom one can only regard with deep compassion. — W. Somerset Maugham

As for myself, I can only exhort you to look on Friendship as the most valuable of all human possessions, no other being equally suited to the moral nature of man, or so applicable to every state and circumstance, whether of prosperity or adversity, in which he can possibly be placed. But at the same time I lay it down as a fundamental axiom that "true Friendship can only subsist between those who are animated by the strictest principles of honour and virtue." When I say this, I would not be thought to adopt the sentiments of those speculative moralists who pretend that no man can justly be deemed virtuous who is not arrived at that state of absolute perfection which constitutes, according to their ideas, the character of genuine wisdom. This opinion may appear true, perhaps, in theory, but is altogether inapplicable to any useful purpose of society, as it supposes a degree of virtue to which no mortal was ever capable of rising. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

It's tough to change friends, and it's even tougher to admit when a friendship has run its course, but it can be an important part of growth, too. Friends come and go and, when you change, oftentimes the things you have in common are no longer in alignment, especially if those things are of a time-wasting or unhealthy nature. We have a finite amount of time - the most valuable resource on this planet - and you have 100 percent control over how that time gets spent. Surround yourself with people who want you to be better, and you will see yourself start to level up faster than ever before. — Steve Kamb

Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

I marvelled about the nature of humanity, and how something as lovely as friendship could stem from something so hideous. — Wendy Higgins

Jem's eyes had widened, and then he'd laughed, a soft laugh. "Did you think I did not know you had a secret?" he'd said. "Did you think I walked into my friendship with you with my eyes shut? I did not know the nature of the burden you carried. But I knew there was a burden." He'd stood up. "I knew you thought yourself poison to all those around you," he'd added. "I knew you thought there to be some corruptive force about you that would break me. I meant to show you that I would not break, that love was not so fragile. Did I do that? — Cassandra Clare

On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers. — George Eliot

I figure that unless you are in the business of politics, covering it or columnizing about it, politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen's mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture and fun. I wish our talk-show culture reflected that balance, and that the emotional register around politics were more in keeping with its low but steady nature. — David Brooks

Talk a walk with me through nature and let's gaze on the marvelous wonders of creation. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I've always been kind of drawn to the extremities of human nature. I wrote my first screenplay when I was 16. The initial idea was a friendship between two prostitutes, and I spent time with a vice squad guy in Cincinnati who brought me to a brothel and gave me the rundown on how street prostitution works. — Veena Sud

If friendship is to transpire between two people, it is important that both be in a state of availability. I have often been in the company of those who complain that they have no friends. Inevitably, I have observed that this condition was due to their own lack of availability; they were too encumbered to be able to welcome another. Such unavailability may be exterior in nature; that is, people may lack the time or the emotional energy necessary for friendship. — Ignace Lepp

You think you walk, Lucy? I think you fly. You see yourself in a uniform? I see you in a cape. You're a hero, of the quietest but most genuine nature. — Kiera Cass

I'm convinced that a lot of people run ultramarathons for the same reason they take mood-altering drugs. I don't mean to minimize the gifts of friendship, achievement, and closeness to nature that I've received in my running career. But the longer and farther I ran, the more I realized that what I was often chasing was a state of mind - a place where worries that seemed monumental melted away, where the beauty and timelessness of the universe, of the present moment, came into sharp focus. I don't think anyone starts running distances to obtain that kind of vision. I certainly didn't. But I don't think anyone who runs ultra distances with regularity fails to get there. The trick is to recognize the vision when it comes over you. — Scott Jurek

We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,
his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,
fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success. — Oscar Wilde

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the toughfibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honored poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It was chivalrous because she was too remote for real companionship, so that there was always a kind of chance in one's offering; perhaps she would not perceive it; perhaps she would kindle rapture by a sudden recognition; her distance made such close moments exquisitely sweet. But alas, no humble friendship however romantic, could give her the sense that we completely shared her thoughts; the nature of them made it hard for anyone to understand; and her sorrow was very lonely. Perhaps one would come into a room unexpectedly and surprise her in tears, and, to one's miserable confusion, she would hide them instantly, and speak ordinary words, as though she did not imagine that one could understand her suffering. — Virginia Woolf

What people think of you is only what they think of themselves. They look at you and see the maladies, the faults they've been carrying within themselves for the longest time. And they identified each flaw they found exactly because of this familiarity and acquaintance with their very own symptoms. How else did they recognize them in you? — Shakieb Orgunwall

Flaubert teaches you to gave upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he teaches you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe the Nature is always a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills
literature is not a pharmacopoeia; he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if you study his private life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance of intelligence, skepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to remain by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the doctrinaire; the need for plain speaking. — Julian Barnes

I lent only half an ear to those well-intentioned folk who say that happiness is enervating, liberty too relaxing, and that kindness is a corruption for those upon whom it is practiced. That may be; but in the world as it is, such reasoning amounts to a refusal to nourish a starving man decently, for fear that in a few years he may suffer from overfeeding. When useless servitude has been alleviated as far as possible, and unnecessary misfortune avoided, there will remain as a test of man's fortitude that long series of veritable ills, death, old age, and incurable sickness, love unrequited and friendship rejected or betrayed, the mediocrity of a life less vast than our projects and duller than our dreams; in short, all the woes caused by the divine nature of things. — Marguerite Yourcenar

We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Dawn and dusk are mutual friends of the sun; one opens the door for him to a brand new day and the other one has to shut it to embrace the darkness of night. — Munia Khan

However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable. A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him. — Victor Hugo

Deep love-true-heart love-must grow. Back then I didn't yet understand the burning kind of love, so instead I thought about the rice paddies I used to see on my daily walks down to the river with my brother when I still had all my milk teeth. Maybe I could make our love grow like a farmer made his crop to grow-through hard work, unwavering will, and the blessings of nature. How funny that I can remember that even now! Waaa! I knew so little about life, but I knew enough to think like a farmer. — Lisa See