All quotes

There is nothing to which nature seems so much to have inclined us, as to society

We sought one another long before we met, and by the characters we heard of one another

Whereas in friendship, 'tis a general and universal fire, but temperate and equal, a constant established heat, all gentle and smooth, without poignancy or roughness.

The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own.

Moreover men commonly deceive themselves in respect of the love which they imagine others bear them, nor can ever be sure of it until they have put it to the proof.

a prince should entrust his friends with so much authority only as leaves a certain interval between his position and theirs

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

To be great is to be misunderstood

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.

If trees could speak, hundreds of them would say that I had had these soul-emotions under them.

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.