Friendship

The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.

-- Abraham Lincoln

The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends thought I didn't exist.

-- Aaron Machado

When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.

-- Henry Miller

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

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 now knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

-- Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.

-- Samuel Paterson

Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.

-- George Santayana

Good friends are good for your health.

-- Irwin Sarason

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.

-- Sydney Smith

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.

-- Walter Winchell

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

-- Virginia Woolf, Bernard, in The Waves, 1931; repr. 1943, p. 189