Last Updated on December 20, 2022
Friends are simply brothers and sisters we didn’t know we had until fate made our paths cross. If you’re lucky enough, the universe might pair you up with a friend that sticks closer than a brother. Such friends may be difficult to come by. But they’re even harder to let go.
However, it really doesn’t matter how close to your heart your friends are. Provided that they can profess their unwavering trust and loyalty in you, especially when the whole world turns its back against you, then they’re definitely friends for keeps. A true friend shouldn’t just stick by your side during fair weather. They should also be there during the most tumultuous times in your life.
True friendship also consists in challenging each other to excel beyond your present circumstances. In this respect, real friends consider each other as members of a close-knit pack. Not only do pack members look out for each other’s safety.
They also thrive in winning as a team and not just individually. Real friends could also view one another as a series of links in one large chain. The strength of the chain depends on the resilience of individual links. And the weakening of a single link threatens the integrity of the entire chain.
But perhaps the most fascinating thing about friendship is that it transcends all manner of barriers, be they natural or humanmade. You can easily make friends with people outside your age bracket. You can also become friends with people living thousands of miles from your hometown.
Factors like gender, social status, religious affiliations, and political views shouldn’t be an impediment to friendships either. All it takes is to have a little bit of shared interest and some chemistry.
Friendship Quotes
Most importantly, friendships should be nurtured for them to flourish. One way to do that is by celebrating your friends at every opportunity you can find. Listed below are 40 heartfelt friendship quotes to help you appreciate that special brother or sister from another mother.
1. “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
2. “Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.” ― Henry David Thoreau
3. “The verb ‘to love’ in Persian is ‘to have a friend.’ ‘I love you’ translated literally is ‘I have you as a friend,’ and ‘I don’t like you’ simply means ‘I don’t have you as a friend.’” – Shusha Guppy
4. “True friends are always together in spirit.” ― Lucy Maud Montgomery
5. “Friendship is like standing on wet cement. The longer you stay, the harder it’s to leave, and you can never go without leaving your footprints behind.” – Moi
6. “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
7. “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
8. “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
9. “It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.” – Epicurus
10. “In the spiritual life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends.” – James Ishmael Ford
11. “You can make it, but it’s easier if you don’t have to do it alone.” – Betty Ford
12. “Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.” – Shel Silverstein
13. No friendship is an accident. ― O. Henry, Heart of the West
14. “Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.” – Henry David Thoreau
15. “The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.” – Elizabeth Foley
16. “Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is.” ― Jim Morrison
17. “The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
18. “Friendship is mutual blackmail elevated to the level of love.” – Robin Morgan
19. “What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.” — Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
20. “Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.” ― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
21. “No man is a failure who has friends.” — It’s a Wonderful Life
22. “True friendship isn’t about being inseparable; it’s about being separated and nothing changes.” – Unknown
23. “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
24. “The best mirror is an old friend.” ― George Herbert
25. “We all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.” – Margaret Guenther
26. “I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.” – Katherine Mansfield
27. “A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
28. “’Stay’ is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.” – Louisa May Alcott
29. “A friend is someone with whom you dare to be yourself.” – Frank Crane
30. “All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.” – Ella Wheeler Wilcox
31. “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.” ― Joan Powers, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book
32. “There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.” ― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
33. “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
34. “I cannot even imagine where I would be today were it not for that handful of friends who have given me a heart full of joy. Let’s face it, friends make life a lot more fun.” – Charles R. Swindoll
35. “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
36. “I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.” ― Helen Keller
37. “A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.” ― William Shakespeare
38. “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” – Elbert Hubbard
39. “Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.” ― Aristotle
40. “We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.” – Letty Cottin Pogrebin