Quotes
36 Friendship Quotes From Books Worth Actually Sending
Most friendship quote collections are unusable, and it's for a specific reason: they're written to be posted, not sent. A line that looks fine over a sunset photo reads as strange when it arrives in a text message from a person you've known for eleven years.
So this list is sorted by who you're sending it to. The friend you've had since school gets a different line than the friend who's having the worst month of her life, and both get something different from the friend you're just now realising you'd take a bullet for. Almost all of these come from books — Cicero and Emerson and Austen did more thinking about friendship than the internet has, and they were better writers.
What a Friend Actually Is
The oldest writing on friendship is also the most direct. Cicero wrote a whole book about it in 44 BC, largely because his own best friend had died and he couldn't think about anything else. These are the definitions that have survived because nobody has improved on them.
A friend is, as it were, a second self.
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.
Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, “What! You too?”
For the Friend You've Had Forever
There's a particular kind of friendship that stops requiring effort — where you can go six months without talking and pick up in the middle of a sentence. Emerson understood this better than anyone, and his line about being stupid with old friends is, we'd argue, the single most accurate sentence ever written on the subject.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
My friends are my estate.
Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other's little failings.
A hedge between keeps friendship green.
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.
For the Friend Going Through Something
These are the ones to actually send. Note how little they try to fix anything — the good lines about hard times all say some version of I am here and I am not going anywhere, which is the only thing that helps. Dinah Craik's is the one people cry at; it's from an 1859 novel almost nobody reads anymore, and it's perfect.
Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.
In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge.
Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them.
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Friendship in the Novels
Novelists have an advantage over philosophers here: they can show you the moment rather than define it. Anne Shirley's “kindred spirits” gave a generation of readers the exact phrase they'd been missing, and Piglet's line from The House at Pooh Corner is arguably the most emotionally precise thing in children's literature.
Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think.
True friends are always together in spirit.
“Pooh?” he whispered. “Yes, Piglet?” “Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
Love is like the wild rose-briar; friendship like the holly-tree.
You are part of my existence, part of myself.
Short Enough to Actually Text
Everything above is worth reading. These are the ones that survive being typed into a message box at 11pm with no context, which is a much harder test.
A true friend is the greatest of all blessings.
There is no possession more valuable than a good and faithful friend.
Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.
And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
Adversity does teach who your real friends are.
One Note on Sending These
If you're picking a line to send to someone specific, the trick is to send the quote and then say why you picked it — one sentence is enough. A quote alone reads like a forward. A quote plus “this made me think of the summer we drove to Marfa” reads like a friend.
And if you want more where these came from: most of the best ones on this page are from books you can read in an afternoon. Cicero's On Friendship is about forty pages. Emerson's essay is twenty.
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