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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Friendship

Friendship is the wine of life.

Young.

Friendship is communion.

Aristotle.

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

Coleridge.

Friendship requires deeds.

Richter.

Preserve friendship.

Stobæus.

Friendship? two bodies and one soul.

Joseph Roux.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul.

Voltaire.

Friendship is full of dregs.

Shakespeare.

Friendship is love without its flowers or veil.

Hare.

Friendship is infinitely better than kindness.

Cicero.

Friendship is stronger than kindred.

Publius Syrus.

Friendship buys friendship.

Emerson.

Friendship is love without his wings!

Byron.

Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.

La Fontaine.

Faith in friendship is the noblest part.

Earl of Orrery.

We call friendship the love of the Dark Ages.

Madame de Salm.

Female friendships are of rapid growth.

Beaconsfield.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Emerson.

Is mutual service the bond of friendship?

William Ellery Channing.

Sudden friendships rarely live to ripeness.

Mlle. de Scudéri.

Love and friendship exclude each other.

De La Bruyère.

No friendship can excuse a sin.

Jeremy Taylor.

The youth is better than the old age of friendship.

Hazlitt.

Poor is the friendless master of a world.

Young.

The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.

Hazlitt.

To friendship every burden’s light.

Gay.

Hold friendship in regard.

Stobæus.

Friendship is but a name. I love no one.

Napoleon I.

Virtue is presupposed in friendship.

Landor.

There is flattery in friendship.

Shakespeare.

Friendship is constant in all other things, save in the office and affairs of love.

Shakespeare.

Kindred weaknesses induce friendships as often as kindred virtues.

Bovee.

Women bestow on friendship only what they borrow from love.

Chamfort.

Friendship is given us by nature, not to favor vice, but to aid virtue.

Cicero.

Dread more the blunderer’s friendship than the calumniator’s enmity.

Lavater.

Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which strengthens with the setting sun of life.

La Fontaine.

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in continue firm and constant.

Socrates.

That friendship will not continue to the end that is begun for an end.

Quarles.

Let friendship creep gently to a height; if it rush to it, it may soon run itself out of breath.

Fuller.

Honest men esteem and value nothing so much in this world as a real friend. Such a one is, as it were, another self.

Pilpay.

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals.

Goldsmith.

The friendships of the world are oft confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasure.

Addison.

The vulgar herd estimate friendship by its advantages.

Ovid.

To desire the same things and to reject the same things, constitutes true friendship.

Sallust.

Friendship is a cadence of divine melody melting through the heart.

Mildmay.

Do not allow grass to grow on the road of friendship.

Madame Geoffrin.

The ideal of friendship is to feel as one while remaining two.

Madame Swetchine.

He who has not the weakness of friendship has not the strength.

Joubert.

Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.

Emerson.

Friendship should be in the singular; it can be no more plural than love.

Ninon de Lenclos.

Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone.

Ouida.

It is true that friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship never.

Colton.

Friendship always benefits, while love sometimes injures.

Seneca.

In friendship we find nothing false or insincere; everything is straightforward, and springs from the heart.

Cicero.

I think there is nothing more lovely than the love of two beautiful women who are not envious of each other’s charms.

Beaconsfield.

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

Emerson.

Friendship is made fast by interwoven benefits.

Sir P. Sidney.

He removes the greatest ornament of friendship who takes away from it respect.

Cicero.

Friendship is the gift of the gods, and the most precious boon to man.

Earl of Beaconsfield.

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.

Emerson.

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.

Emerson.

The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.

Hazlitt.

A sudden thought strikes me, let us swear eternal friendship.

Canning.

The highest friendship must always lead us to the highest pleasure.

Fielding.

Sincerity, truth, faithfulness, come into the very essence of friendship.

William Ellery Channing.

What is commonly called friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

Thoreau.

We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.

Thoreau.

  • Friendship has a power
  • To soothe affliction in her darkest hour.
  • H. K. White.

    Friendship is a plant that loves the sun, thrives ill under clouds.

    A. Bronson Alcott.

    Friendship with a man is friendship with his virtue, and does not admit of assumptions of superiority.

    Mencius.

    In friendship your heart is like a bell struck every time your friend is in trouble.

    Henry Ward Beecher.

    True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.

    Colton.

    Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.

    Hazlitt.

    Friendship is the most pleasant of all things, and nothing more glads the heart of man.

    Plutarch.

    There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself; we cannot force it any more than love.

    Hazlitt.

    Friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and sways with an absolute sovereignty, can admit of no rival.

    Montaigne.

    O friendship! thou divinest alchemist, that man should ever profane thee!

    Douglas Jerrold.

    Friendship is a traffic wherein self-love always proposes to be the gainer.

    La Rochefoucauld.

    Friendship requires a steady, constant, and unchangeable character, a person that is uniform in his intimacy.

    Plutarch.

    Friendship***is a long time in forming, it is of slow growth, through many trials and months of familiarity.

    La Bruyère.

    Friendship is the greatest honesty and ingenuity in the world.

    Jeremy Taylor.

    Interest, ambition, fortune, time, temper, love, all kill friendship.

    Joseph Roux.

    I love a friendship that flatters itself in the sharpness and vigor of its communications.

    Montaigne.

    The vital air of friendship is composed of confidence. Friendship perishes in proportion as this air diminishes.

    Joseph Roux.

    Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

    Emerson.

    The dearest thing in nature is not comparable to the dearest thing of friendship.

    Jeremy Taylor.

  • ’Tis thus that on the choice of friends
  • Our good or evil name depends.
  • Gay.

    To have the same desires and the same aversion is assuredly a firm bond of friendship.

    Sallust.

    Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in continue firm and constant.

    Socrates.

    Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings.

    Isaac Disraeli.

    Friendships begin with liking or gratitude—roots that can be pulled up.

    George Eliot.

    Pure friendship is something which men of an inferior intellect can never taste.

    De La Bruyère.

  • Great souls by instinct to each other turn,
  • Demand alliance, and in friendship burn.
  • Addison.

    As often as I come back to his door, his love met me on the threshold, and his noble serenity gave me comfort and peace.

    William Winter.

    Ceremony and great professing renders friendships as much suspected as it does religion.

    Wycherley.

    It is said that friendship between women is only a suspension of hostilities.

    Rivarol.

    In the forming of female friendships beauty seldom recommends one woman to another.

    Fielding.

    A true and noble friendship shrinks not at the greatest of trials.

    Jeremy Taylor.

    Friendship between two women is always a plot against another one.

    Alphonse Karr.

    The light of friendship is like the light of phosphorus,—seen plainest when all around is dark.

    Crowell.

    Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.

    Sydney Smith.

  • True friendship’s laws are by this rule express’d,
  • Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.
  • Homer.

    “There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship; and indeed friendship itself is only a part of virtue.”

    Pope.

    The friendship between me and you I will not compare to a chain; for that the rains might rust, or the falling tree might break.

    Bancroft.

    Some friendships are made by nature, some by contract, some by interest, and some by souls.

    Jeremy Taylor.

    A summer friendship, whose flattering leaves, that shadowed us in our prosperity, with the least gust drop off in the autumn of adversity.

    Massinger.

    We cannot expect the deepest friendship unless we are willing to pay the price, a self-sacrificing love.

    Peloubet.

    If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love our friends for their sake rather than our own.

    Charlotte Brontë.

    In the opinion of the world marriage ends all, as it does in a comedy. The truth is precisely the reverse; it begins all.

    Mme. Swetchine.

    Friendship, like love, is self-forgetful. The only inequality it knows is one that exalts the object, and humbles self.

    Henry Giles.

    Friendship throws a greater luster on prosperity, while it lightens adversity by sharing in its griefs and anxieties.

    Cicero.

    Friendship consists properly in mutual offices, and a generous strife in alternate acts of kindness.

    South.

    Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.

    Cicero.

    A friendship that makes the least noise is very often the most useful; for which reason I should prefer a prudent friend to a zealous one.

    Addison.

    To what gods is sacrificed that rarest and sweetest thing upon earth, friendship? To vanity and to interest.

    Malesherbes.

    I would give more for the private esteem and love of one than for the public praise of ten thousand.

    W. R. Alger.

    Friendship is too pure a pleasure for a mind cankered with ambition, or the lust of power and grandeur.

    Junius.

    He who cannot feel friendship is alike incapable of love. Let a woman beware of the man who owns that he loves no one but herself.

    Talleyrand.

    As the yellow gold is tried in fire, so the faith of friendship must be seen in adversity.

    Ovid.

    We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves, that there may be grounds enough for friendship.

    Thoreau.

    Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

    Cicero.

    There is no friendship between those associated in power; he who rules will always be impatient of an associate.

    Lucan.

    Nature loves nothing solitary, and always reaches out to something, as a support, which ever in the sincerest friend is most delightful.

    Cicero.

    Friendship is seldom lasting, but between equals, or where superiority is reduced by some equivalent advantage.

    Johnson.

    Love and esteem are the first principles of friendship, which always is imperfect where either of these two is wanting.

    Budgell.

    We should remember that it is quite as much a part of friendship to be delicate in its demands as to be ample in its performances.

    J. F. Boyes.

    Friendship is like those ancient altars where the unhappy, and even the guilty, found a sure asylum.

    Madame Swetchine.

    Friendship is the medicine for all misfortune; but ingratitude dries up the fountain of all goodness.

    Richelieu.

    The services which cement friendship are reciprocal services. A feeling of dependence is scarcely compatible with friendship.

    William Smith.

    A friendship formed in childhood, in youth,—by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood,—becomes the genius that rules the rest of life.

    A. Bronson Alcott.

    The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, friendships, require a degree of good-breeding both to preserve and cement them.

    Lord Chesterfield.

    Friendship is to be purchased only by friendship. A man may have authority over others, but he can never have their heart but by giving his own.

    Thomas Wilson.

    Friendship’s said to be a plant of tedious growth, its root composed of tender fibers, nice in their taste, cautious in spreading.

    Vanbrugh.

    Nature and religion are the bands of friendship, excellence and usefulness are its great endearments.

    Jeremy Taylor.

    The friendship I have conceived will not be impaired by absence; but it may be no unpleasing circumstance to brighten the chain by a renewal of the covenant.

    George Washington.

    We are most of us very lonely in this world; you who have any who love you, cling to them and thank God.

    Thackeray.

    The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

    Johnson.

    There is a magic in the memory of schoolboy friendships; it softens the heart, and even affects the nervous system of those who have no hearts.

    Beaconsfield.

    Whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.

    Bacon.

    I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

    Emerson.

    Friendship heightens all our affections. We receive all the ardor of our friend in addition to our own. The communication of minds gives to each the fervor of each.

    William Ellery Channing.

    That friendship only is, indeed, genuine when two friends, without speaking a word to each other, can, nevertheless, find happiness in being together.

    George Ebers.

    Fix yourself upon the wealthy. In a word, take this for a golden rule through life: Never, never have a friend that is poorer than yourself.

    Douglas Jerrold.

    Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.

    Hafiz.

    The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity; as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.

    Colton.

    If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.

    Johnson.

    Friendships are the purer and the more ardent, the nearer they come to the presence of God, the Sun not only of righteousness but of love.

    Landor.

    A good man is the best friend, and therefore soonest to be chosen, longer to be retained, and, indeed, never to be parted with, unless he cease to be that for which he was chosen.

    Jeremy Taylor.

    No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman.

    Landor.

    To find by experience that friendships are mortal, is the hard but inevitable lot of fallible and imperfect men.

    Dr. Parr.

  • Friendship, peculiar boon of Heaven,
  • The noble mind’s delight and pride,
  • To men and angels only given,
  • To all the lower world denied.
  • Sam’l Johnson.

  • Hand
  • Grasps hand, eye lights eye in good friendship,
  • And great hearts expand,
  • And grow one in the sense of this world’s life.
  • Robert Browning.

  • Friendship’s an abstract of this noble flame,
  • ’Tis love refin’d, and purged from all its dross,
  • ’Tis next to angel’s love, if not the same,
  • As strong in passion is, though not so gross.
  • Catherine Philips.

  • O friendship, equal-poised control,
  • O heart, with kindliest motion warm,
  • O sacred essence, other form,
  • O solemn ghost, O crowned soul!
  • Tennyson.

    Friendship, gift of heaven, delight of great souls; friendship which kings, so distinguished for ingratitude, are unhappy enough not to know.

    Voltaire.

    Charity commands us, where we know no ill, to think well of all; but friendship that always goes a step higher, gives a man a peculiar right and claim to the good opinion of his friend.

    South.

  • And what is friendship but a name,
  • A charm that lulls to sleep;
  • A shade that follows wealth or fame,
  • And leaves the wretch to weep?
  • Goldsmith.

    In friendship we only see those faults which may be prejudicial to our friends. In love we see no faults but those by which we suffer ourselves.

    De La Bruyère.

    As the shadow in early morning, is friendship with the wicked; it dwindles hour by hour. But friendship with the good increases, like the evening shadows, till the sun of life sets.

    Herder.

    If two men are united, the wants of neither are any greater, in some respects, than they would be were they alone, and their strength is superior to the strength of two separate men.

    Sénancour.

    We value the devotedness of friendship rather as an oblation to vanity than as a free interchange of hearts; an endearing contract of sympathy, mutual forbearance, and respect!

    Jane Porter.

    False friendship like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.

    Robert Burton.

    He who disguises tyranny, protection, or even benefits under the air and name of friendship reminds me of the guilty priest who poisoned the sacramental breads.

    Chamfort.

  • Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
  • And never brought to mind?
  • Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
  • And days o’ lang syne?
  • Burns.

    Friendship hath the skill and observation of the best physician, the diligence and vigilance of the best nurse, and the tenderness and patience of the best mother.

    Clarendon.

    Thou mayest be sure that he who will in private tell thee of thy faults is thy friend, for he adventures thy dislike and doth hazard thy hatred.

    Sir Walter Raleigh.

  • Friendship, mysterious cement of the soul,
  • Sweetener of life, and solder of society,
  • I owe thee much: thou hast deserv’d from me
  • Far, far beyond what I can ever pay.
  • Blair.

    Although a friend may remain faithful in misfortune, yet none but the very best and loftiest will remain faithful to us after our errors and our sins.

    F. W. Farrar.

    What is friendship in virtuous minds but the concentration of benevolent emotions heightened by respect, and increased by exercise on one or more objects?

    Robert Hall.

    Friendship is made up of esteem and pleasure; pity is composed of sorrow and contempt: the mind may for some time fluctuate between them, but it can never entertain both at once.

    Goldsmith.

  • A generous friendship no cold medium knows,
  • Burns with one love, with one resentment glows;
  • One should our interests and our passions be,
  • My friend must hate the man that injures me.
  • Pope.

    I account that one of the greatest demonstrations of real friendship, that a friend can really endeavor to have his friend advanced in honor, in reputation, in the opinion of wit or learning, before himself.

    Jeremy Taylor.

    What is more notorious than that wherever a pecuniary interest appears upon the scene, friendship retires? Whether you take money from me, or whether you give it, the transaction is alike fatal to our old bond of amity.

    William Smith.

    The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use. Habit may still attach us to each other, but we feel ourselves fettered by it. Old friends might be compared to old married people without the tie of children.

    Hazlitt.

    A woman’s friendship borders more closely on love than man’s. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.

    Coleridge.

    It seems to me that a truly lovable woman is thereby unfitted for friendship, and that a woman fitted for friendship is but little fitted for love.

    Alexander Walker.

    I have too deeply read mankind to be amused with friendship; it is a name invented merely to betray credulity; it is intercourse of interest, not of souls.

    Havard.

    There is this important difference between love and friendship: while the former delights in extremes and opposites, the latter demands equalities.

    Mme. de Maintenon.

    Friendship is a calm and sedate affection, conducted by reason and cemented by habit; springing from long acquaintance and mutual obligations, without jealousies or fears, and without those feverish fits of heat and cold, which cause such an agreeable torment in the amorous passion.

    Hume.

    There is a power in love to divine another’s destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?

    Emerson.

    True friendship cannot be among many. For since our faculties are of a finite energy, it is impossible our love can be very intense when divided among many. No, the rays must be contracted to make them burn.

    John Norris.

    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 alone that constitutes true and perfect friendship.

    La Rochefoucauld.

    What is commonly called friendship is no more than a partnership; a reciprocal regard for one another’s interests, and an exchange of good offices; in a word, a mere traffic, wherein self-love always proposes to be a gainer.

    La Rochefoucauld.

    These hearts which suck up friendship like water, and yield it again with the first touch, might as well expect to squeeze a sponge and find it hold its moisture, as to retain affections which they are forever dashing from them.

    Jane Porter.

    As friendship must be founded on mutual esteem, it cannot long exist among the vicious; for we soon find ill company to be like a dog, which dirts those the most whom he loves the best.

    Chatfield.

    Character is so largely affected by associations that we cannot afford to be indifferent as to who and what our friends are. They write their names in our albums, but they do more, they help make us what we are. Be therefore careful in selecting them; and when wisely selected, never sacrifice them.

    M. Hulburd.

    O friendship! thou fond soother of the human breast, to thee we fly in every calamity; to thee the wretched seek for succor; on thee the care-tired son of misery fondly relies; from thy kind assistance the unfortunate always hopes relief, and may be sure of disappointment.

    Goldsmith.

    In your friendships and in your enmities let your confidence and your hostilities have certain bounds; make not the former dangerous, nor the latter irreconcilable. There are strange vicissitudes in business.

    Chesterfield.

    It is hard to believe long together that anything is “worth while,” unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.

    George Eliot.

    We hate some persons because we do not know them; and we will not know them because we hate them. The friendships that succeed to such aversions are usually firm; for those qualities must be sterling that could not only gain our hearts, but conquer our prejudices.

    Colton.

    The friendship between great men is rarely intimate or permanent. It is a Boswell that most appreciates a Johnson. Genius has no brother, no co-mate; the love it inspires is that of a pupil or a son.

    Bulwer-Lytton.

  • Old books, old wine, old nankin blue—
  • All things, in short, to which belong
  • The charm, the grace that Time makes strong,
  • All these I prize, but (entre nous)
  • Old friends are best.
  • Austin Dobson.

  • Friendship, like love, is but a name,
  • Unless to one you stint the flame.
  • The child, whom many fathers share,
  • Hath seldom known a father’s care.
  • ’Tis thus in friendships; who depend
  • On many, rarely find a friend.
  • Gay.

    It may be worth noticing as a curious circumstance, when persons past forty before they were at all acquainted form together a very close intimacy of friendship. For grafts of old wood to take, there must be a wonderful congeniality between the trees.

    Whately.

    Once let friendship he given that is born of God, nor time nor circumstance can change it to a lessening; it must be mutual growth, increasing trust, widening faith, enduring patience, forgiving love, unselfish ambition,—an affection built before the throne, that will bear the test of time and trial.

    Allan Throckmorton.

    Friendship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that result to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize. Such natures are liable to no mistakes, but will know each other through thick and thin. Between two by nature alike and fitted to sympathize, there is no veil, and there can be no obstacle. Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining.

    Thoreau.

    Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions. What we have missed long enough to want it, we value more when it is regained; but that which has been lost till it is forgotten will be found at last with little gladness, and with still less if a substitute has supplied the place.

    Johnson.

    Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age.

    Hamerton.

    There are three friendships which are advantageous, and three which are injurious. Friendship with the upright; friendship with the sincere; and friendship with the man of much observation: these are advantageous. Friendship with the man of specious airs; friendship with the insinuatingly soft; and friendship with the glib-tongued: these are injurious.

    Confucius.

    Perfect friendship puts us under the necessity of being virtuous. As it can only be preserved among estimable persons, it forces us to resemble them. You find in friendship the surety of good counsel, the emulation of good example, sympathy in our griefs, succor in our distress.

    Madame de Lambert.

    Friendship is the alloy of our sorrows, the ease of our passions, the discharge of our oppressions, the sanctuary to our calamities, the counsellor of our doubts, the clarity of our minds, the emission of our thoughts, the exercise and improvement of what we meditate. And although I love my friend because he is worthy, yet he is not worthy if he can do no good.

    Jeremy Taylor.

    When I see leaves drop from their trees in the beginning of autumn, just such, think I, is the friendship of the world. Whilst the sap of maintenance lasts my friends swarm in abundance; but in the winter of my need they leave me naked.

    Warwick.

    The friendship of high and sanctified spirits loses nothing by death but its alloy; failings disappear, and the virtues of those whose “faces we shall behold no more” appear greater and more sacred when beheld through the shades of the sepulchre.

    Robert Hall.

    The most elevated and pure souls cannot hear, even from the lips of the most contemptible men, these words, “friendship,” “sensibility,” “virtue,” without immediately attaching to them all the grandeur of which their heart is susceptible.

    Richter.

    Let me take up your metaphor. 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.

    With a clear sky, a bright sun, and a gentle breeze, you will have friends in plenty; but let fortune frown, and the firmament be overcast, and then your friends will prove like the strings of the lute, of which you will tighten ten before you find one that will bear the stretch and keep the pitch.

    Gotthold.

    The highest compact we can make with our fellow is,—let there be truth between us two forevermore.***It is sublime to feel and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him; we need not reinforce ourselves or send tokens of remembrance; I rely on him as on myself; if he did thus or thus, I know it was right.

    Emerson.

  • Thy presence sweet
  • Still through long years of vigil I may share,
  • For if from that enchanted spirit-land
  • Thy healthful thought into my soul may shine
  • (E’en though thy voice be still, and cold thy hand,)
  • To lift my life and make it pure as thine;
  • Then, though thy place on earth a void must be,
  • Beloved friend, thou art not dead to me.
  • H. H. Boyesen.

  • Come back! ye friendships long departed!
  • That like o’erflowing streamlets started,
  • And now are dwindled, one by one,
  • To stony channels in the sun!
  • Come back! ye friends, whose lives are ended,
  • Come back, with all that light attended,
  • Which seemed to darken and decay
  • When ye arose and went away!
  • Longfellow.

  • Fast as the rolling seasons bring
  • The hour of fate to those we love,
  • Each pearl that leaves the broken string
  • Is set in Friendship’s crown above.
  • As narrower grows the earthly chain,
  • The circle widens in the sky;
  • These are our treasures that remain,
  • But those are stars that beam on high.
  • O. W. Holmes.

    How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.

    Carlyle.

    People young, and raw, and self-natured, think it an easy thing to gain love, and reckon their own friendship a sure price of any man’s; but when experience shall have shown them the hardness of most hearts, the hollowness of others, and the baseness and ingratitude of almost all, they will then find that a true friend is the gift of God, and that He only who made hearts can unite them.

    South.

    A wound in the friendship of young persons, as in the bark of young trees, may be so grown over as to leave no scar. The case is very different in regard to old persons and old timber. The reason of this may be accountable from the decline of the social passions, and the prevalence of spleen, suspicion, and rancor towards the latter part of life.

    Shenstone.

  • Rejoice, and men will seek you;
  • Grieve, and they turn and go,
  • They want full measure of all your pleasure,
  • But they do not need your woe.
  • Be glad, and your friends are many;
  • Be sad, and you lose them all,—
  • There are none to decline your nectar’d wine,
  • But alone you must drink life’s gall.
  • Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

    When the first time of love is over, there comes a something better still. Then comes that other love; that faithful friendship which never changes, and which will accompany you with its calm light through the whole of life. It is only needful to place yourself so that it may come, and then it comes of itself. And then everything turns and changes itself to the best.

    Fredrika Bremer.

    Such is friendship, that through it we love places and seasons; for as bright bodies emit rays to a distance, and flowers drop their sweet leaves on the ground around them, so friends impart favor even to the places where they dwell. With friends even poverty is pleasant. Words cannot express the joy which a friend imparts; they only can know who have experienced. A friend is dearer than the light of heaven, for it would be better for us that the sun were exhausted than that we should be without friends.

    St. Chrysostom.

    There are many moments in friendship, as in love, when silence is beyond words. The faults of our friend may be clear to us, but it is well to seem to shut our eyes to them. Friendship is usually treated by the majority of mankind as a tough and everlasting thing which will survive all manner of bad treatment. But this is an exceedingly great and foolish error; it may die in an hour of a single unwise word; its conditions of existence are that it should be dealt with delicately and tenderly, being as it is a sensitive plant and not a roadside thistle. We must not expect our friend to be above humanity.

    Ouida.