Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California

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Cloud Hands Blog   

"But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine."
-  Thomas Jefferson  

"Friends are the sunshine of life."
-  John Hay

"A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely."
-  Pam Brown 

"But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold."
-  Oliver Wendell Holmes

"If your trusted and people will allow you to share their inner garden.. what better a gift."
-  Fred Rogers  

"Friendship is a sheltering tree."
-  Samuel Taylor Coleridge  

"A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world."
-  Leo Buscaglia

"Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need most."
-  American Proverb  

"Friends are like money, easier made than kept."
-  Samuel Butler

"Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go."
-  Margaret Walker  

"Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend."
-  Oliver Wendell Holmes 

Friendship for Grown-Ups: What I Missed and Learned Along the Way  By Lisa Whelchel 

When Friendship Hurts: How to Deal with Friends Who Betray, Abandon, or Wound You  By Jan Yager  

The Fabric of Friendship: Celebrating the Joys, Mending the Tears in Women's Relationships  By Joy Carol 

"True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable." 
-  Dave Tyson Gentry
 

"There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person's eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him.  At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends.  These are the moments worth living."
-  Don Marquis 

"A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship."
-  John D. Rockefeller   

"If we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say what we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them."
-  Christopher Morley

"Love is like the wild-rose briar;
Friendship is like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?"
-  Emily Brontë  

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed"
-  Carl Jung

"Best friends are made are made through smiles and tears, and sometimes that fades away through miles and years."
-  Arnold McCuller 

"It takes a long time to grow an old friend."
-  John Leonard 

"This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joy, and cutteth griefs in half."
-  Francis Bacon

"Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with."
-  Mark Twain

"Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity."
-  Kahil Gibran

"Friendship without self interest is one of the rare and beautiful things in life."
-  James Francis Byrnes

"May good luck be your friend, and whatever you do, and may trouble be always a stranger to you."
-  Irish Blessing    

"To be rich in friends is to be poor in nothing"
-  Lilian Whiting 

"The finest kind of friendship is between two people who expect a great deal of each other, but never ask it."
-  Syvia Bremer  

"Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as any other fragile and precious things."
-  Randolph S. Bourne

"And Pooh said to Piglet "Life is so much friendlier with two."
-  A.A.Miline  

"A friend is a gift you give yourself."
-  Robert Louis Stevenson 

"Friendship is Love, without his wings."
-  Lord Byron   

"Hold a friend's hand through times of trial,
Let her find love through a hug and a smile,
But also know when it is time to go
For each and every one of us must learn to grow."
-  Sharon A. Heilbrunn 

"Treasure each other in the recognition that we do not know how long we shall have each other."
-  Joshua Loth Liebman 

"It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help."
-  Epicurus 

"Friends know what you want them to know about you. Best friends know what you don't even know about yourself. And True friends help you build yourself from all they know"
-  Jessica Spellman

"No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever."
-  Francois Mocuriac 

"Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you."
-  Elbert Hubard

"I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better."
-  Plutarch

"Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.
Walk beside me and be my friend."
-  Albert Camus

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...  It has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival."
-  C. S. Lewis

"Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.
For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.
But woe to him that is alone when he falleth;
For he hath not another to help him up."
-  Ecclesiastes

"Make new friends but keep the old, some are Silver and others are Gold"
-  Girl Scout Motto 

"A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails."
-  Donna Roberts
 

"A friend is someone who is there for you when he'd rather be anywhere else."
-  Len Wein

"True friendship is never serene."
-  Mariede Svign

"I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody."
-  Benjamin Franklin

"Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand."
-  Karl Menninger  

"Promise you won't forget me, because if I thought you would, I'd never leave."
-  A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh  

"Friends are born, not made."
-  Henry Adams

"One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human."
-  George Santayana 

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.  The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
-  Henri Nouwen  

"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"
-  George Eliot 

"I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world."
-  Thomas A. Edison

"The best mirror is an old friend."
-  George Herbert

"Friendship is one mind in two bodies."
-  Mencius

"The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him, his own."
-  Benjamin Disraeli

"It is a sweet thing, friendship, a dear balm,
A happy and auspicious bird of calm..."
-  Shelly

"A man should choose a friend who is better than himself.  There are plenty of acquaintances in the world; but very few real friends."
-  Chinese Proverb

"The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart."
-  Elizabeth Foley  

"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?"
-  Henry David Thoreau

"The better part of one's life consists of his friendships."
-  Abraham Lincoln

"I get by with a little help from my friends."
-  John Lennon

"A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably."
-  William Penn  

"Constant use will not wear ragged the fabric of friendship."
-  Dorothy Parker 

"Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannot congeal in winter."
-  James Fenimore Cooper

"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods."
-  Artistotle

"One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter."
-  Francoise Sagan   

"Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joy, and dividing our grief."
-  Joseph Addison

"One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night."
-  Margaret Mead  

"The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away."
-  Wilson Mizner

"Do not save your loving speeches
For your friends till they are dead;
Do not write them on their tombstones,
Speak them rather now instead."
-  Anna Cummins

"I can trust my friends.  These people force me to examine, encourage me to grow."
-  Cher

"Friendship, said Christopher Robin, is a very comforting thing to have."
-  A.A. Milne

"My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me."
-  Henry Ford

"Don't go looking for friends, because the best ones always seem to find you."
-  Sarah Landon

"We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection."
-  The 14th Dali Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

"Probably no man ever had a friend that he did not dislike a little."
-  E.W. Howe   

"The happiest moments my heart knows are those in which it is pouring forth its affections to a few esteemed characters."
-  Thomas Jefferson   

"A new friendship is like an unripened fruit - it may become either an orange or a lemon"
-  Emma Stacey

"True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
-  Joseph Addison 

"Too late we learn, a man must hold his friend
Unjudged, accepted, trusted to the end."
-  John Boyle O'Reilly

"I'd like to be the sort of friend that you have been to me. I'd like to be the help that you've been always glad to be; I'd like to mean as much to you each minute of the day, as you have meant, old friend of mine, to me along the way."
-  Edgar A. Guest

"A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world."
-  Leo Buscaglia  

"I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world."
-  Blaise Pascal 

"Thus nature has no love for solitude, and always leans, as it were, on some support; and the sweetest support is found in the most intimate friendship."
-  Cicero

"Sir, more than kisses, letters, mingle souls;
For, thus friends absent speak."
-  John Donne  

"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends."
-  Virginia Woolf 

"Friends, in my experience, are like ladies' fashions. They come and go with the seasons, and are rarely of such stout stuff as bears repeated wearing."
-  Stephanie Barron

"No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence."
-  George Eliot

"If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone.  A man should keep his friendships in constant repair."
-  Samuel Johnson

 

"A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down."
-  Arnold Glasow
 

"I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial."
-  Thomas Jefferson

"Winter, spring, summer, or fall, all you gotta do is call, and I'll be there, 'cause you've got a friend."
-  Carole King, You've Got a Friend  

"Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty." 
-  A Italian Proverb
 

"In the spiritual life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends."
-  James Ishmael Ford 

"I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends."
-  Walt Whitman

"Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends."
-  Mary Catherwood

"Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends."
-  Shirley MacLaine

"Friendship is not friendship without trust, without it I walk alone."
-  James P. Michels

"Friendship with oneself is all-important because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world."
-  Eleanor Roosevelt

"One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one."
-  D.H. Lawrence 

"My friends are my estate."
-  Emily Dickinson

"Never refuse any advance of friendship, for if nine out of ten bring you nothing, one alone may repay you."
-  Madame de Tencin 

"Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success."
-  Oscar Wilde

"The making of friends, who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man's success in life."
-  Edward Everett Hale

"We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy." 
-  Arthur Ashe

"Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world"
-  William James

"A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out."
-  Grace Pulpit

"There is magic in the memory of schoolboy friendships; it softens the heart, and even affects the nervous system of those who have no heart."
-  Bejamin Disraeli

"It isn't kind to cultivate a friendship just so one will have an audience."
-  Lawana Blackwell   

"Friend - a person known well to another and regarded with liking, affection and loyalty."
-  Collins English Dictionary

"I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson 

"There are different levels of friendships, some are half-empty and others are rising and over half-full.
Some information about yourself is best never shared, not even with friends. 
A few friends are just a pain the ass, and not friends for long.
Graveyards and landscape gardens, coffins and flowers - fitting friends.
Many friendships are sustained by a mutual hatred of another person or group.
A good friendship is like a two way paved street, a bad friendship like a one way dirt road coming to a dead end."   - -  By Mike Garofalo, Pulling Onions 

"Thank you for giving me something no one else could - yourself."
-  Heather Lynch

"My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, you've had a great life."
-  Lee Iacocca

"Most of us don't need a psychiatric therapist as much as a friend to be silly with." 
-  Robert Brault 

"There is magic in long-distance friendships.  They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound."
-  Diana Cortes 

"There is no hope of joy except in human relations."
-  Antoine de Sainte-Exupery

"The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried."
-  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry  

"The friend within the man is that part of him which belongs to you and opens to you a door which never, perhaps, is opened to another.  Such a friend is true, and all he says is true; and he loves you even if he hates you in other mansions of his heart." 
-  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

"If I had to sum up 'Friendship' in one word, it would be 'Comfort.' "
-  Terri Guillemets
 

"A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they're not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they're not so bad." 
-  Arnold H. Glasgow 

"But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely.  Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away."
-  Dinah Craik  

"If I'm in heaven and your not there,
I'd carve your name in golden chairs,
for all the angels there to see,
that I love you and you love me.
If your not there on judgment day,
I'll know you've gone the other way,
so just to prove our love is true,
I'd go to hell to be with you."
-  Jackie Paul

"A friend to all is a friend to none."
-  Aristotle

"You can always tell a real friend:  when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job."
-  Laurence J. Peter  

"Friendship is one mind in two bodies."
-  Mencius
 

"Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends.  Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming."
-  William Hazlitt  

"True friendship's laws are by this rule express'd,
Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest."
-  Alexander Pope

"Misfortune shows those who are not really friends."
-  Aristotle

"Friends are like pillars on your porch. Sometimes they hold you up and sometimes they lean on you."
-  Sharon Foltz

"It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend."
-  William Blake 

"The world would be so lonely in sunny hours or gray,
Without the gift of friendship
To help us every day."
-  Hilda Brett Farr

"When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance."
-  Anatole Broyard   

"A friend should be one in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and its sincerity."
-  Robert Hall  

"Promise you won't forget me, because if I thought you would, I'd never leave."
-  A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh 

"I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends."
-  William Shakespeare

"Life is partly what we make it, and partly what is made by the friends whom we choose."
-  Tehyi Hsieh

"The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship."
-  Frances Bacon 

"A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world."
-  Lois Wyse  

"When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character."
-  W. Somerset Maugham

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
-  Albert Camus 

"A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be."
-  Douglas Pagels 

"In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends."
-  John C. Collins 

"Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love."
-  Letty Cottin Pogrebin 

"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence."
-  George Washington

"What joy is better than news of friends?"
-  Robert Browning 

"Friends are like peanut butter and jelly; they always stick together.
If friends were flowers, I'd pick you.
A best friend is like a four-leaf clover: hard to find, but lucky to have.
You can count your true friends on one hand. 
The best thing to do behind a person's back is to pat it.
Shared joy is double joy, shared sorrow is half sorrow.
A friend is a third eye."
-  Author Unknown or Anonymous or a Proverb

Caring, Compassion and Generosity  

The Friendship Factor: How to Get Closer to the People You Care for  By Alan McGinnis