The quote database

Might not someone jeer at us in the same way, as being afraid, when we have not yet one firm friendship, that we shall without knowing it fall upon an abundance of friends?

Whereas having many friends puts people apart and severs and disunites them, by transferring and shifting the tie of friendship too frequently, and does not admit of a mixture and welding of goodwill by the diffusing and compacting of intimacy.

intimacy is the full enjoyment of friendship, and most pleasant is companying with and spending the day with a friend

not to find friends at a time when you want them is hard, as also not to be able to exchange an inconstant and bad friend for a constant and good one

a friend should be like money tried before being required, not found faulty in our need

these things occurring daily and being importunate make the mind little, and narrow, and unsocial, and harsh, and timid, so that, being besieged and taken in hand by grief, it can no longer laugh, and shuns daylight, and avoids society

it seems to me that the Muses aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works by calling in exile as a fellow-worker

What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood.

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.

To be great is to be misunderstood

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.

One protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner,--each concealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict association.

Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish.

Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole.

Amongst ourselves we are unendingly cheerful, but what each man feels in his heart I can only guess.

The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget.

Love should run out to meet love with open arms.

Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.