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
Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need most. ~American Proverb
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. ~William Blake
The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate
A true friend reaches for your hand and touches your heart. ~Author Unknown
Friendship is a sheltering tree. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
We are keenly aware of the faults of our friends, but if they like us enough it doesn't matter. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends. ~Shirley Maclaine
Friendship is Love, without his wings. ~Lord Byron, L'Amitié est l'Amour sans Ailes
There is magic in long-distance friendships. They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound. ~Diana Cortes
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. ~Author Unknown
A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us to be what we should. ~Author Unknown
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away. ~Barbara Kingsolver
Probably no man ever had a friend that he did not dislike a little. ~E.W. Howe
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
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
'Tis a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his. ~Benjamin Franklin
The best rule of friendship is to keep your heart a little softer than your head. ~Author Unknown
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
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive. ~Anäis Nin
Friends are relatives you make for yourself. ~Eustache Deschamps
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
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Journals, 1843
Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The essence of true friendship is to make allowance for another's little lapses. ~David Storey
Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming. ~William Hazlitt
In my friend, I find a second self. ~Isabel Norton
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