There is a particular kind of conversation that only happens between real friends. The kind where no one is performing, no one is being careful, and the silences are as comfortable as the words. Most people have had it maybe a handful of times in their lives, with maybe a handful of people. C.S. Lewis called it the moment when one person turns to another and says “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” That recognition, that sudden feeling of being found rather than merely known, is what separates a true friend from everyone else in your life who is simply nearby.

What is striking about the lines gathered here is how many of them arrive at friendship from the angle of loss. Nietzsche observed that it is the absence of friendship, not love, that wrecks most marriages. Seneca wrote about it from exile. Virginia Woolf said she went to her friends the way others went to priests. These were not people writing from warmth and abundance; they were writing from the sharp awareness of what a life without the right people in it actually costs. That is what gives these words their weight. They are not sentimental. They are honest.

Friendship Quotes

80 Best Friendship Quotes

Quotes About What Friendship Actually Is

  • “Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…'” C.S. Lewis
  • “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “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
  • “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.” Anaïs Nin
  • “Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.” Aristotle
  • “The language of friendship is not words but meanings.” Henry David Thoreau
  • “A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.” Jim Morrison
  • “Friendship is the complete explanation of what a Cheetah Girl is: if you have that true friendship, you can conquer anything you want.” Raven-Symoné
  • “Friendships are discovered rather than made.” Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • “Friendships are the family we make, not the one we inherit.” Salman Rushdie

Quotes About The Friends Who Show Up

  • “A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.” Walter Winchell
  • “Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.” Helen Keller
  • “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
  • “I think if I’ve learned anything about friendship, it’s to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don’t walk away, don’t be distracted, don’t be too busy or tired, don’t take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together.” Jon Katz
  • “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means 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.” Henri Nouwen
  • “A true friend is more to be esteemed than kinsfolk.” Marcus Tullius Cicero
  • “The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.” Francis Bacon
  • “A single rose can be my garden; a single friend, my world.” Leo Buscaglia
  • “One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.” Euripides
  • “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

Quotes About What Friends Do to You

  • “My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.” Henry Ford
  • “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” Marcel Proust
  • “A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.” Charles Darwin
  • “Your friends will believe in your potential, your enemies will make you live up to it.” Tim Fargo
  • “In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.” Khalil Gibran
  • “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” E.B. White
  • “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” Abraham Lincoln
  • “There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first; when you learn to live for others, they will live for you.” Paramahansa Yogananda
  • “The greatest gift of life is friendship, and I have received it.” Hubert H. Humphrey
  • “Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.” George Eliot

Friendship Quotes About Honesty, Loyalty, and the Hard Parts

  • “True friendship ought never to conceal what it thinks.” St. Jerome
  • “It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.” Confucius
  • “Never explain: your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.” Elbert Hubbard
  • “Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.” Blaise Pascal
  • “True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.” Charles Caleb Colton
  • “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Martin Luther King Jr.
  • “False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.” Richard Burton
  • “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.” François de La Rochefoucauld
  • “True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.” Henry David Thoreau

Friendship Quotes About Growing Old Together

  • “It takes a long time to grow an old friend.” John Leonard
  • “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
  • “Friendships begun in this world will be taken up again, never to be broken off.” Saint Francis de Sales
  • “Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.” Jesse Owens
  • “There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” Thomas Aquinas
  • “At the end of your life, it’s friendships, emotions and thoughts that you take with you, rather than what’s in your bank account.” Unknown
  • “Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.” Virginia Woolf
  • “Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.” John C. Maxwell
  • “I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.” Walt Whitman
  • “Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.” Sydney Smith

Short Friendship Quotes

  • “There are no strangers here; only friends you have not yet met.” William Butler Yeats
  • “My friends are my estate.” Emily Dickinson
  • “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca
  • “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” Mark Twain
  • “There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends.” Jane Austen
  • “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Groucho Marx
  • “Animals are such agreeable friends; they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.” George Eliot
  • “Silence is a true friend who never betrays.” Confucius
  • “I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind.” Khalil Gibran
  • “A friend is what the heart needs all the time.” Henry Van Dyke

Quotes About What We Owe Each Other

  • “Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.” George Sand
  • “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.” Bob Marley
  • “Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.” Vera Nazarian
  • “Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives.” Anthon St. Maarten
  • “Tell them that your life would lose meaning if they disappeared from it. Tell them you love them.” Aminatou Sow
  • “Be present. Form real friendships. Stay away from friendships where there is always an underlying angle.” Naval Ravikant
  • “We can learn so much about someone by the way they talk about their friends.” Aminatou Sow
  • “According to Aristotle, friends hold a mirror up to each other. This mirror allows them to see things they wouldn’t be able to observe if they were holding up the mirror to themselves.” Aminatou Sow
  • “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.” Anaïs Nin
  • “The essence of true friendship is to make allowance for another’s little lapses.” David Storey

Funny Friendship Quotes

  • “You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.” Harry S. Truman
  • “There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.” Linda Grayson
  • “It’s your duty as my best friend to be outraged with me.” Ilona Andrews
  • “If you come at four in the afternoon, I’ll begin to be happy by three.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Groucho Marx
  • “Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.” Benjamin Franklin
  • “A good friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body.” Jim Hayes
  • “It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “True friends stab you in the front.” Oscar Wilde
  • “Friends: people who borrow my books and set wet glasses on them.” Edwin Arlington Robinson

Final Thoughts

Aristotle divided friendships into three kinds: those based on usefulness, those based on pleasure, and those based on virtue, meaning a genuine admiration for who the other person is. He thought the first two were common and the third was rare, and he was right. Most people can count their Aristotelian friendships on one hand, and some of those hands have very few fingers raised. That rarity is not a reason to despair. It is a reason to pay attention, to recognize the thing when you have it, and to not take for granted the specific, irreplaceable person who has somehow decided that your company is worth returning to.

The lines in this collection, from Seneca to Oprah to C.S. Lewis to a handful of people whose names no one remembers, all circle the same territory: that being known by another person, truly and without performance, is one of the few things in life that cannot be replaced by any amount of achievement, success, or distraction. Call the friend. Make the time. Say the thing you’ve been meaning to say. These words have been saying it for centuries. The least you can do is act on them.

Inspirational Quotes