Your friend is your needs answered. He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving. And he is your board and your fireside. For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.
What I know for sure is that if you can survive 11 days in cramped quarters with a friend and come out laughing, your friendship is the real deal. I know ours is.
A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit.
And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were.
Friendship is but a name, faith is an empty name. Alas,
it is not safe to praise to a friend the object of your love;
as soon as he believes your praises, he slips into your place.
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."
A man cannot speak to his son, but as a father; to his wife, but as a husband; to his enemy, but upon terms: whereas a friend may speak, as the case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person.
We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.