Click on the Image link to see images associated with any of the quotes

The greatest sweetener of human life is friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.
Joseph Addison

True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Joseph Addison The Spectator (1711-12)

There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself - an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly.
Antisthenes

Some people weave burlap into the fabric of our lives, and some weave gold thread. Both contribute to make the picture beautiful and unique.
Anon

Friendship is a plant which must be often watered.
Anon

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads, or frost work, but the solidest things we know. A friend is the first person who come in when the whole world has gone out.
Anonymous

Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious. -
Saint Thomas Aquinas

The best preservative to keep the mind in health is the faithful admonition of a friend.
Francis Bacon

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
Pearl S. Buck

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

If you want an accounting of your worth, count your friends.
Merry Browne

For my own part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than with an absent one; for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows me no contempt; whereas the absent one, silently indeed, but very plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention.
Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773), English statesman, man of letters.

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

A friend is, as it were, a second self.
Cicero, De Amicitia - Roman author, orator, & politician (106 BC - 43 BC)

Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts or measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.
Benjamin Disraeli

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trouble is a sieve through which we sift our acquaintances. Those too big to pass through are our friends.
Arlene Francis

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?
Kahlil Gibran

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures, for in the dew of little things, the heart finds its meaning and is refreshed.
Kahlil Gibran

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
Johann Wolfgang von Goeth

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
Goethe

The friend of my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.
Ulysses S. Grant

To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.
William Hazlitt - English Writer 1778 – 1830

No young man starting in life could have better capital than plenty of friends. They will strengthen his credit, support him in every great effort, and make him what, unaided, he could never be. Friends of the right sort will help him more - to be happy and successful - than much money.
Orison Swett Marden (1850-1924) Founder, Success Magazine

I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.
John Muir

No love, no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.
-- Francois Muriac

Hold a true friend with both hands.
Nigerian Proverb

What I cannot love, I overlook.
Anais Nin

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anais Nin

We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection.
Jean Paul Richter

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

We have no more right to put our discordant states of mind into the lives of those around us and rob them of their sunshine and brightness than we have to enter their houses and steal their silverware.
Julian Seton

Without the desire and ability to create new understandings, a relationship can't grow -- it can only be maintained.
Michael Schrage American author

One who knows how to show and to accept kindness will be a friend better than any possession.
Sophocles

Life without a friend is death without a witness.
Spanish proverb

No greater burden can be born by an individual than to know none who cares or understands.
Arthur H. Stainback

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Robert Lewis Stevenson

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Confidence is the only bond of friendship
Publilius Syrus, Moral Sayings (1st C. B.C.)

No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth.
Robert Southey (1774-1843)

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
Henry David Thoreau

Friends...they cherish one another's hopes. they are kind to one another's dreams."
Henry David Thoreau

Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay awhile and leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever, the same.
Flavia Weedn