My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself,I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of the individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.
Friendship is not something you can learn in college or some learning institution, no one knows how to become friends you just become but if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship you haven't learned anything
The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.
When I was young I thought of friendship as a matter of total loyalty and unchanging preference and I was often disappointed. But as an adult I had come to see that it was more the refraction of some total faithfulness and joy of which we all had some primordial notion. The exchange of trust and the experience of understanding between two people was like a sign or witness to the possibilitity of eternal caring and understanding and communication.
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.
When someone asked Abraham Lincoln, after he was elected president, what he was going to do about his enemies, he replied, "I am going to destroy them. I am going to make them my friends."
I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expect everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate good. . . . If we will take the good we find, . . . we shall have heaping measures. . . .
A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?