Quotes on Friendship

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning to a friendship, and it is far the best ending to one.

When you lend money to a friend you usually lose your friend plus interest.

I can be friends with people only when they are at their lowest point and have neither the desire nor the strength to restore their habitual sentimental illusions.

Friendship is a pact, a convention. Two beings tacitly promise never to broadcast what each really thinks of the other. A kind of alliance based on compromises. When one of them publicly calls attention to the other's defects, the pact is declared null and void, the alliance broken. No friendship lasts if one of the partners ceases to play the game. In other words, no friendship tolerates an exaggerated proportion of honesty.

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.