Few things have such a huge impact on happiness and the enjoyment, depth and plain fun of life as the friendships we have.
It could be the friendships with our partners, family members, co-workers and the people we have known for a few years now or since we were kids.
Or even with people we have never even met at the other side of the world or the pets we love.
So I’d like to start this year by looking back and share some of the best advice on this topic from the people who have walked this earth over the past hundreds and thousands of years.
This is 74 thought-provoking, beautiful, sometimes poignant and sometimes funny quotes on friendship.
Trending Video: The 21 Best Quotes of All Time
“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.”
– Walter Winchell
“If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day, so I never have to live without you.”
– Winnie the Pooh
“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
– Ernest Hemingway
Friendship Quote by C.S Lewis
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
– C.S. Lewis
“True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.”
– David Tyson
“Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.”
– Washington Irving
“There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.”
– Jim Henson
“A single rose can be my garden… a single friend, my world.”
– Leo Buscaglia
“Don’t make friends who are comfortable to be with. Make friends who will force you to lever yourself up.”
– Thomas J. Watson
Friendship Quote by Dale Carnegie
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
— Dale Carnegie
“A friend is someone who understands your past, believes in your future, and accepts you just the way you are.”
– Unknown
“What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”
– Confucius
Friendship Quote by Oscar Wilde
“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.”
– Oscar Wilde
“How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live ’em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give ’em.”
– Shel Silverstein
“A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.”
– Arnold H. Glasgow
Friendship Quote by Plutarch
“I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”
– Plutarch
“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”
– Albert Schweitzer
“The real test of friendship is can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?”
– Eugene Kennedy
Friendship Quote by Arnold Glasgow
“A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they’re not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they’re not so bad.”
– Arnold H. Glasgow
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.”
– Muhammad Ali
“If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together… there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart… I'll always be with you.”
– Winnie the Pooh
“Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.”
– Ally Condie
“One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”
– George Santayana
Friendship Quote by Audrey Hepburn
“For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”
— Audrey Hepburn
“Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm & constant.”’
– Socrates
“One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.”
– Clifton Fadiman
“Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations. Don’t over-analyze your relationships. Stop playing games. A growing relationship can only be nurtured by genuineness. “
– Leo F. Buscaglia
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
– Marcel Proust
Friendship Quote by Charles Lamb
“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”
– Charles Lamb
“If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.”
– Zig Ziglar
“You can always tell a real friend: when you’ve made a fool of yourself he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.”
– Laurence J. Peter
Friendship Quote by Mark Twain
“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”
– Mark Twain
“Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.”
– William Arthur Ward
“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
– Alice Walker
“Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”
– Woodrow T. Wilson
friendship_quotes_2
“Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer.”
– Ed Cunningham
“Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.”
— Anthony Robbins
“The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.”
– Elisabeth Foley
“There’s one sad truth in life I’ve found
While journeying east and west –
The only folks we really wound
Are those we love the best.
We flatter those we scarcely know,
We please the fleeting guest,
And deal full many a thoughtless blow
To those who love us best.”
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Friendship Quote by Oprah Winfrey
“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”
— Oprah Winfrey
“Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone — but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.”
– William Hazlitt
“A good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling.”
– Arthur Brisbane
“Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.”
– Emil Ludwig
“A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill requires only our silence; which costs us nothing.”
— John Tillotson
Friendship Quote by Donald Miller
“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.”
– Donald Miller
“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
“If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.”
– Maxwell Maltz
Friendship Quotes by Bernard Meltzer
“A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.”
– Bernard Meltzer
“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.”
— Joseph F. Newton Men
“Friendship is like a glass ornament, once it is broken it can rarely be put back together exactly the same way.”
– Charles Kingsley
Friendship Quote by Donna Roberts
“A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.”
– Donna Roberts
“There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate. “
– Linda Grayson
“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.”
– Gloria Naylor
Friendship Quote by Marlene Dietrich
“It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.”
– Marlene Dietrich
“There is magic in long-distance friendships. They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound.”
– Diana Cortes
“Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.”
— Miles Franklin
“It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.”
– Epicurus
“Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”
– William James
friendship_quotes_3
“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.”
– Tennessee Williams
“The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
– Abraham Lincoln
“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friendship Quote by Ethel Barrymore
“The best time to make friends is before you need them.”
– Ethel Barrymore
“If it’s very painful for you to criticize your friends — you’re safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that’s the time to hold your tongue.”
– Alice Duer Miller
“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, for in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”
– Khalil Gibran
“Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget.”
– Unknown
Friendship Quote by Carl W. Buechner
“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Carl W. Buechner
“The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.”
— Dale Carnegie
“Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
– Albert Camus
“To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.”
– Brandi Snyder
abebaw
10Q so much!!!!
LINK
Hayley
I LOVE your posts they’re so inspiring and exactly what I need!
LINK
stephen osoko
“What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”
– Confucius
It’s such a simple concept and if many actually took it on, the world would be such a more wonderful place to live in. Imagine it!
I’m not perfect myself, but I’m getting there.
LINK
Kzee
beautiful quotes thnaks!
LINK
Christian Cee
I love these quotes. Thanks for sharing them with us. I even wrote some of these quotes on my wall calendar… and now I’m thinking to adding more across my house. Thanks again. :D
LINK
It could be the friendships with our partners, family members, co-workers and the people we have known for a few years now or since we were kids.
Or even with people we have never even met at the other side of the world or the pets we love.
So I’d like to start this year by looking back and share some of the best advice on this topic from the people who have walked this earth over the past hundreds and thousands of years.
This is 74 thought-provoking, beautiful, sometimes poignant and sometimes funny quotes on friendship.
Trending Video: The 21 Best Quotes of All Time
“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.”
– Walter Winchell
“If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day, so I never have to live without you.”
– Winnie the Pooh
“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
– Ernest Hemingway
Friendship Quote by C.S Lewis
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
– C.S. Lewis
“True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.”
– David Tyson
“Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.”
– Washington Irving
“There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.”
– Jim Henson
“A single rose can be my garden… a single friend, my world.”
– Leo Buscaglia
“Don’t make friends who are comfortable to be with. Make friends who will force you to lever yourself up.”
– Thomas J. Watson
Friendship Quote by Dale Carnegie
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
— Dale Carnegie
“A friend is someone who understands your past, believes in your future, and accepts you just the way you are.”
– Unknown
“What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”
– Confucius
Friendship Quote by Oscar Wilde
“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.”
– Oscar Wilde
“How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live ’em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give ’em.”
– Shel Silverstein
“A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.”
– Arnold H. Glasgow
Friendship Quote by Plutarch
“I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”
– Plutarch
“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”
– Albert Schweitzer
“The real test of friendship is can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?”
– Eugene Kennedy
Friendship Quote by Arnold Glasgow
“A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they’re not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they’re not so bad.”
– Arnold H. Glasgow
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.”
– Muhammad Ali
“If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together… there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart… I'll always be with you.”
– Winnie the Pooh
“Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.”
– Ally Condie
“One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”
– George Santayana
Friendship Quote by Audrey Hepburn
“For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”
— Audrey Hepburn
“Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm & constant.”’
– Socrates
“One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.”
– Clifton Fadiman
“Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations. Don’t over-analyze your relationships. Stop playing games. A growing relationship can only be nurtured by genuineness. “
– Leo F. Buscaglia
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
– Marcel Proust
Friendship Quote by Charles Lamb
“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”
– Charles Lamb
“If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.”
– Zig Ziglar
“You can always tell a real friend: when you’ve made a fool of yourself he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.”
– Laurence J. Peter
Friendship Quote by Mark Twain
“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”
– Mark Twain
“Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.”
– William Arthur Ward
“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
– Alice Walker
“Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”
– Woodrow T. Wilson
friendship_quotes_2
“Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer.”
– Ed Cunningham
“Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.”
— Anthony Robbins
“The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.”
– Elisabeth Foley
“There’s one sad truth in life I’ve found
While journeying east and west –
The only folks we really wound
Are those we love the best.
We flatter those we scarcely know,
We please the fleeting guest,
And deal full many a thoughtless blow
To those who love us best.”
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Friendship Quote by Oprah Winfrey
“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”
— Oprah Winfrey
“Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone — but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.”
– William Hazlitt
“A good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling.”
– Arthur Brisbane
“Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.”
– Emil Ludwig
“A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill requires only our silence; which costs us nothing.”
— John Tillotson
Friendship Quote by Donald Miller
“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.”
– Donald Miller
“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
“If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.”
– Maxwell Maltz
Friendship Quotes by Bernard Meltzer
“A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.”
– Bernard Meltzer
“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.”
— Joseph F. Newton Men
“Friendship is like a glass ornament, once it is broken it can rarely be put back together exactly the same way.”
– Charles Kingsley
Friendship Quote by Donna Roberts
“A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.”
– Donna Roberts
“There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate. “
– Linda Grayson
“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.”
– Gloria Naylor
Friendship Quote by Marlene Dietrich
“It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.”
– Marlene Dietrich
“There is magic in long-distance friendships. They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound.”
– Diana Cortes
“Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.”
— Miles Franklin
“It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.”
– Epicurus
“Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”
– William James
friendship_quotes_3
“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.”
– Tennessee Williams
“The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
– Abraham Lincoln
“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friendship Quote by Ethel Barrymore
“The best time to make friends is before you need them.”
– Ethel Barrymore
“If it’s very painful for you to criticize your friends — you’re safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that’s the time to hold your tongue.”
– Alice Duer Miller
“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, for in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”
– Khalil Gibran
“Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget.”
– Unknown
Friendship Quote by Carl W. Buechner
“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Carl W. Buechner
“The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.”
— Dale Carnegie
“Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
– Albert Camus
“To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.”
– Brandi Snyder
abebaw
10Q so much!!!!
LINK
Hayley
I LOVE your posts they’re so inspiring and exactly what I need!
LINK
stephen osoko
“What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”
– Confucius
It’s such a simple concept and if many actually took it on, the world would be such a more wonderful place to live in. Imagine it!
I’m not perfect myself, but I’m getting there.
LINK
Kzee
beautiful quotes thnaks!
LINK
Christian Cee
I love these quotes. Thanks for sharing them with us. I even wrote some of these quotes on my wall calendar… and now I’m thinking to adding more across my house. Thanks again. :D
LINK
