Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Friendship
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True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
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Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
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A true Friendship is as wise as it is tender. The parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no otherlaw nor kindness.
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We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste.
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Our actual Friends are but distant relations of those to whom we are pledged.
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Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.
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A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
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The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams.
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The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
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I would that I were worthy to be any man's Friend.
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The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand.
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I had but three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship; three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up.
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Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.
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My friend is one who takes me for what I am. A stranger takes me for something else than what I am. . . . What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue.
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Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet: he it is who makes the truest use of the pine-who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane. . . .
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I have never met with a friend who furnished me sea-room. I have only tacked a few times and come to anchor - not sailed - made no voyage, carried no venture.
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Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.
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There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains itsmaxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.
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Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!
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What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!
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Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.
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Friendship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that result to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize. Such natures are liable to no mistakes, but will know each other through thick and thin. Between two by nature alike and fitted to sympathize, there is no veil, and there can be no obstacle. Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining.
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The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
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The only danger in Friendship is that it will end.
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To say that a man is your Friend means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.
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We never exchange more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise.
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We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.
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I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.
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Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
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I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie themselves and deny me continually.
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