A to Z of Friendship Quotes

Friendship is like wetting your pants. Everyone can see it, but only you feel the true warmth.

Friends, those we make along the way, work colleagues, friends from the slimming club, friends within our church, friends from the school gate, or even those that we are still in touch with from our years at school or college. Some are for a season then drift away; others develop into life-long soul mates. The thing that the best type of friends have in common is no matter what we are dealing with, they make us feel we are not alone. In a world where our relationships and career paths are more fluid than ever they are a lifeline that even the most independent person cannot live without.

There are many blogs and websites listing friendship quotes but it is hard to find one that is in any way extensive. I have attempted to compile a comprehensive list (It would have taken forever the compile an exhaustive list) of quotes about friendship. They are arranged in alphabetical order under a number of headings:

Qualities of a True Friend - The best qualities and attributes that a best friend should bring to a friendship; ideal for writing in a greeting card to your best friend.

What is Friendship? - Definitions, generally poetic, of what true friendship is.

General Quotes about Friends & Friendship - these are quotes that I have not categorised but form the most extensive section.

Humorous Friendship Quotes - a light-hearted (but not without a hint of truth) look at friendship.

Proverbs - Various proverbs from different countries about friendship.

I hope you enjoy the list and if you make it to the end and you have enjoyed it please leave a comment. If you have any other favourites that I have missed out please add them via the comments section for others to enjoy.

Qualities of a True of a Friend

• A Friend Asks For Food While A Best Friend Raids The Fridge. - Unknown
• A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell youself. - Frances Ward Weller
• A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us to be what we should. - Unknown
• A friend hears the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails. - Unknown
• 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
• A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same. - Elbert Hubbard
• A friend is someone who picks you up when nobody else has even realized you've fallen. - Unknown
• A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out. - Grace Pulpit
• A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails. - Donna Roberts
• A friend should be one in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and its sincerity. - Robert Hall
• A friend will call you an idiot, but a best friend will not only call you one but act like one with you. - Unknown
• A friend will walk in miles, will share tears and give you smiles and even though paths may sometimes drift apart, true friends never leave the heart. - Unknown

• An honest friend is a precious gift; wrapped carefully with sincerity, affection, trust, concern and love. -Unknown

• A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world. - Lois Wyse

• A good friend will be there for you when you cry, But a best friend will have a wet shoulder because of it. - Unknown

• 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
• A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out. - Walter Winchell
• A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother. - Homer (9th century B.C.)
• A true friend is one who overlooks your failures and tolerates your success! - Doug Larson
• A true friend is someone who is there for you when he’d rather be somewhere else. - Len Wein
• A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down. - Arnold H. Glasow
• A true friend reaches for your hand and touches your heart. - Attributed to Heather Pryor
• A true friend sticks with you through thick and thin no matter what. - Unknown
• A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably. - William Penn
• Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success - Oscar Wilde

• Best friends remember when you say to forget it. They’ll wait forever when you say just a minute. They know something’s wrong when you say whatever. That’s how you know your best friend's forever. - Unknown

• Best friends: They know how stupid you are and still choose to be seen with you in public. - Unknown
• Friends are like walls. Sometimes you lean on them, and sometimes it's good just knowing they are there. - Unknown
• Friends are the most important ingredient in this recipe of life. - Unknown

• Friends are the ones that laugh with you not at you. - Unknown

• Friends are the sailors who guide your rickety boat safely across the dangerous waters of life. - Sare and Cate

• Friends give us the courage to lift the blinds on our hearts. To open up and show what we generally keep hidden from the rest of the world. - Unknown

• Friends never make assumptions about you. They never expect a reason to go out with you. In fact friends only expect you to be you. - Unknown
• Friends show their love in times of trouble. - Euripides
• Good friends are like stars...You don't always see them, but you know they are always there. - Unknown
• Good friends get mad if you wake them up when you call, a best friend asks what took you so long to call. - Unknown
• It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter. - Marlene Dietrich
• Most people walk in and out of you life. But only friends leave footprints in your heart. - Unknown
• Real friends are those who care without hesitation, who remembers you without limitation, who trustful without suspicion and who loves even without communication. - Justice Cabral
• Real friends point out your qualities, not your flaws. - Unknown

• The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares. - Henri Nouwen
• The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away. - Barbara Kingsolver
• The way I see it is that good friends support each other after something bad has happened, great friends act as if nothing has happened. -Gabrielle, Desperate Housewives
• When it hurts to look back, and you're scared to look ahead, you can look beside you and your best friend will be there. - Unknown
• Your friend is the person who knows all about you, and still likes you. - Elbert Hubbard

What is Friendship?

• A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely. - Pam Brown
• But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine. - Thomas Jefferson
• But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

• Friendship is a precious gift that can’t be bought or sold. It’s value is greater than mountains made of gold. If you shall ask God for a gift be thankful if he sends not diamonds pearls or riches but the love and trust of friends. - Unknown

• Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies. - Aristotle
• Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love. - Jane Austen
• Friendship is held to be the severest test of character. It is easy, we think, to be loyal to a family and clan, whose blood is in your own veins. - Charles Alexander Eastman
• Friendship is love without his wings! - Lord Byron
• Friendship is not a big thing. Its a million little things. - Unknown
• Friendship is one mind in two bodies. - Mencius
• Friendship is the golden thread that ties the heart of all the world. - John Evelyn
• Friendship isn't about whom you have known the longest. It's about who came, and never left your side. - Unknown
• Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness. - Dag Hammarskjold
• If I had to sum up friendship in one word, it would be comfort. - Terri Guillemets
• It is always a pleasure to lend a helping hand, to care without reserve, and to give without expecting something in return...this is the essence of true friendship that will thrive the test of time. - Unknown
• It is not what you give your friend, but what you are willing to give him that determines the quality of friendship. - Mary Dixon Thayer
• Lovely friendship is like standing on the wet cement, the longer you stay, the harder it is to leave and if you try to go you can’t go without leaving your footprint! - Unknown

• One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error. -Edward Bulwer-Lytton

• 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
• True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable. - Dave Tyson Gentry
• True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity, before it is entitled to the appellation. - George Washington
• True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
  - Charles Caleb Colton
• True friendship is when two friends can walk in opposite directions, yet remain side by side. - Unknown
• True friendship isn't about being there when it's convenient; it's about being there when it's not. - Unknown
• True friendship never ends. - Unknown

• When we first talked to each other I knew we would always be friends.

  Our friendship has kept on growing and I'll be here for you to the end.

  You listen when I have a problem and help dry the tears from my face.

  You take away my sorrow and put happiness in its place.

  We can't forget the fun we've had. Laughing 'til our faces turn blue.

  Talking of things only we find funny. People think we're insane. If they only knew!

  I guess this is my way of saying thanks for catching me when I fall.

  Thanks once again for being such a good friend and being here with me through it all.

  
  When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. - Henri Nouwen

• Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit. - Aristotle

General Quotes about Friends & Friendship

• A best friend is like a four leaf clover: hard to find and lucky to have. - Sarah Jessica Parker
• A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be. - Douglas Pagels
• A friend is a present you give yourself. - Robert Louis Stevenson
• A friend to all is a friend to none. - Aristotle
• A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship. - John D. Rockefeller
• A good friendship is where a silence isn’t awkward. - Unknown
• A hug is like a boomerang - you get it back right away. - Bil Keane
• A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• A road to a friend’s house is never long. - Unknown
• A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world. - Leo Buscaglia
• A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care to acquire. - La Rochefoucauld (1665)
• Advice from your friends is like the weather, some of it is good, some of it is bad.
  - Unknown
• Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• An honest answer is the sign of true friendship. - Unknown
• Are we not like two volumes of one book? - Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
• Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. - George Washington
• Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. -Samuel Paterson
• Count your age with friends but not with years. - John Lennon
• Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend. - Albert Camus
• Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive. -Anäis Nin
• Eachmeeting occurs at the precise moment for which it was meant. Usually, when it will have the greatest impact on our lives. - Nadia Screvia
• Everyone is a friend, until they prove otherwise. - Unknown
• Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends. - Shirley MacLaine
• Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go. - Margaret Walker

• Friends are angels who help us to soar when our wings have forgotten how to fly. - Unknown

• Friends are born, not made. - Henry B. Adams
• Friends are forever. - Unknown
• Friends are God’s way of taking care of us. - Unknown
• Friends are kisses blown to us by angels. - Unknown

• Friends are like snowflakes, none of them are the same! - Unknown

• Friends are the reason why even at the saddest part of my life, I smile. Why even at my confusion, I understand. Why even at betrayal, I trust. Why even in fear of pain, I love. - Unknown
• Friends are relatives you make for yourself. -Eustache Deschamps
• Friendship is to be purchased only by friendship. A man may have authority over others, but he can never have their hearts but by giving his own. - Thomas Wilson
• Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. - C. S. Lewis
• Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil. - Baltasar Gracian
• Friendship with oneself is all-important because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world. - Eleanor Roosevelt
• Friendship... is not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything. - Muhammad Ali
• Good friends are good for your health.- Irwin Sarason
• Good friends are hard to find, harder to leave, and impossible to forget. - Unkown
• Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. - Mark Twain
• However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship. - La Rochefoucauld (1665)
• I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing. - Katherine Mansfield
• I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world. - Thomas A. Edison
• I like her because she smiles at me and means it. - Unknown
• I’ve always said that in politics, your enemies can’t hurt you, but your friends will kill you. - Ann Richards
• I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar. - Robert Brault
• I wish friends were like dollar bills, so you could hold ‘em up to the light and see if they’re fake. - Unkown
• I would rather have your friendship than; win the lottery, become a famous rock musician, discover a new planet, find the secret of eternal youth, have a whole bag of jelly babies all to myself. - Stuart & Linda MacFarlane
• I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light. - Helen Keller
• If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give. - George MacDonald
• 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
• If two past lovers can remain friends, either they never were in love or they still are. - Unknown
• If your friends aren't making fun of you, they're not really your friends. - Unknown
• If you're alone, I'll be your shadow. If you want to cry, I'll be your shoulder. If you want a hug, I'll be your pillow. If you need to be happy, I'll be your smile. But anytime you need a friend, I'll just be me. - Unknown
• 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
• In my friend, I find a second self. - Isabel Norton
• In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends. -John Churton Collins
• In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. -Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
• In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. - Kahil Gibran
• Instead of loving your enemies - treat your friends a little better. - Edward W. Howe
• It is a wealthy person, indeed, who calculates riches not in gold but in friends. - Jim Stovall
• It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business. - Mahatma Gandhi
• It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not. - Mignon McLaughlin
• It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help. - Epicurus
• It is not what you give your friend, but what you are willing to give him that determines the quality of friendship. - Mary Dixon Thayer
• It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• It takes a long time to grow an old friend. - John Leonard

• Keep in touch in any way. Reach out for a friend who's far away. Let him feel that you're just near, despite the distance you remain closer. - Unknown
• Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit. - Kahil Gibran
• Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. - Marcel Proust
• Let your best be for your friend... - Kahil Gibran
• Life has no blessing like a prudent friend. - Euripides
• Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends whom we choose. - Tehyi Hsieh
• Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence. – Sydney Smith
• 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
• Love demands infinitely less than friendship. - George Jean Nathan
• Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love. - Charles Peguy
• Lovers have a right to betray you... friends don't. - Judy Holliday
• 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
• Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces. - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends. - Samuel Pepys
• Most of us don't need a psychiatric therapist as much as a friend to be silly with. - Robert Brault
• Never explain - your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway. - Elbert Hubbard
• No man is useless while he has a friend. - Robert Louis Stevenson
• Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend. - Plautus
• Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other. - Honore de Balzac
• Of all the friends I've ever met, you're the one I won't forget. And if I die before you do, I'll go to heaven and wait for you. - Unknown
• Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor 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 Craik
• One close friend is worth more than a thousand of acquaintances. - Unknown
• One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives. - Euripides
• Remember, the greatest gift is not found in a store nor under a tree, but in the hearts of true friends. - Cindy Lew
• Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand. - Emily Kimbrough
• She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind. - Toni Morrison
• Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts. - Margaret Lee Runbeck, -Answer Without Ceasing
• Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them. - Francesco Guicciardini
• Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same. - Flavia Weedn, - Forever.
• Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. - Virginia Woolf
• Sometimes we come into a person’s life not to make them love us, but to make them feel that they're so much worth living for.
• Soul-mates are people who bring out the best in you. They are not perfect but are always perfect for you. - Unknown
• Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary - Louisa May Alcott
• The best kind of friend is the one you could sit on a porch with, never saying a word, and walk away feeling like that was the best conversation you've had. -Unknown
• The best time to make friends is before you need them. - Ether Barrymore
• The language of friendship is not words but meanings. - Henry David Thoreau
• The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart. - Elisabeth Foley
• The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend. - Henry David Thoreau
• The most memorable people in life will be the friends who loved you when you weren’t very loveable.-Unknown
• The only way to have a friend is to be one. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The person who says they don’t need a friend needs a friend the most. -Roscoe Osborne
• There is no distance too far for best friends because friendship gives wings to the heart. - Unknown
• There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship. - Thomas Aquinas
• There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul. - Edith Wharton
• Things are never quite as scary when you have a best friend. - Bill Watterson
• Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected - Charles Lamb
• We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over. - Samuel Johnson
• When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it. - Edgar Watson Howe
• When you die, if you’ve got five real friends, then you’ve had a great life. - Lee Iacocca
• Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Yes we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check her diary when we arrange to meet. - Jeanette Winterson, - Written on the Body, 1992
• You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people, than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. -Bernard Meltzer
• You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality. - Woodrow Wilson
• Your friend is your needs answered. - Kahil Gibran
• Your friends are what will matter in the end. - Unknown
• You know that you have great friends when the only time they make you cry is when you are laughing too hard. - Unknown

Humorous Friendship Quotes

• A friend is like a potato chip, you can’t have just one! - Unknown
• A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked. - Bernard Meltzer.
• A true friend will play ninja with you in the middle of Walmart and think it's normal. - Unknown
• A good friend is someone who will help you move; a really good friend willhelp you move a dead body. - Unknown
• A good friend helps you when you fall; a best friend laughs at you and trips you again. - Unknown
• A real friend will only turn their back to you when your breath stinks. - Unknown
• A stranger stabs you in the front.
  A bad friend stabs you in the back.
  An ex-boyfriend stabs you in the heart.
  but…
  best friends only poke each other with straws! – Unknown
• I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street. - Virginia Woolf
• Finding a friendship like ours is like nailing jello to a tree, impossible! - Unknown
• Friends are God’s apology for relatives. - Unknown
• Friends are like bras: close to your heart and there for support. - Unknown
• Friends are like Peanut Butter and Jelly, they always stick together. – Unknown
• Friends will comfort you when a guy rejects you, but a best friend will go up to him and say “it’s because you are g*a*y isn’t it?” – Unknown
• Friendship is like a piece of pie; it’s all good until it comes to the end and becomes all crummy. - Unknown
• Friendship is like wetting your pants. Everyone can see it, but only you feel the true warmth. - Unknown
• God made us best friends because he knew that our moms couldn’t handle us as sisters. – Unknown
• Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh!" he whispered. "Yes, Piglet?" "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you." - A.A. Milne
• The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends thought I didn't exist - Aaron Machado
• There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate - Charles Dickens
• 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

• You know we are good friends, if you smile I smile, if you cry I cry, if you are mad I'm also mad and if you jump of a cliff, trust me, I will miss your e-mails. - Unknown

Proverbs

• An honest answer is the sign of true friendship. - Proverbs 24:26
• Do not protect yourself by a fence, but rather by your friends. - Czech. Proverb
• Friendship doubles our joy and divides our grief. - Swedish proverb
• Hold a true friend with both your hands. - Nigerian Proverb
• No road is long with good company. - Turkish Proverb
• One who looks for a friend without faults will have none. - Hasidic Proverb
• Only your real friends tell you when your face is dirty. - Italian / Sicilian Proverb
• Who finds a faithful friend, finds a treasure. - Jewish Saying

See also the A to Z of Love quotes.