Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Bias NULL

It is better to decide between our enemies than our friends; for one of our friends will most likely become our enemy; but on the other hand, one of your enemies will probably become your friend.

Better | Character | Enemy | Friend | Will | Friends |

Richard Baxter

I must confess, as the experience of my own soul, that the expectation of loving my friends in heaven principally kindles my love to them while on earth.

Character | Earth | Expectation | Experience | Heaven | Love | Soul | Expectation | Friends |

Robert Collyer

A man's best friends are his ten fingers.

Character | Man | Friends |

J. E. Dinger

Three men are my friends - he that loves me, he that hates me and he that is indifferent to me. Who loves me, teaches me tenderness; who hates me, teaches me caution; who is indifferent to me, teaches me self-reliance.

Caution | Character | Men | Self | Self-reliance | Tenderness | Friends |

Cyrus the Great, aka Cyrus the Elder, Cyrus II or Cyrus of Persia NULL

All men have their frailties; and whoever looks for a friend without imperfections, will never find what he seeks. We love ourselves notwithstanding our faults, and we ought to love our friends in like manner.

Character | Frailties | Friend | Looks | Love | Men | Will | Friends |

Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler

If you make an effort to help everyone you meet, you will feel close to everyone. A stranger is someone you have not yet helped. Doing acts of kindness for everyone you can fills your world with friends and loved ones.

Character | Effort | Kindness | Will | World | Friends |

M. Hulburd

Character is so largely affected by associations that we cannot afford to be indifferent as to who and what our friends are. They write their names in our albums, but they do more, they help make us what we are. Be therefore careful in selecting them; and when wisely selected, never sacrifice them.

Character | Sacrifice | Friends |

Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL

If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, pursue by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge, for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one's friends and not accept it. Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth , for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time.

Better | Character | Good | Knowledge | Love | Time | Wealth | Will | Friends |

Publius Syrus

Forgive an enemy and you win friends without cost.

Character | Cost | Enemy | Friends |

Binyamin Yehoshua Silver

Never stop seeking to increase the number of friends you have. Conversely, even one enemy is too many.

Character | Enemy | Friends |

William Makepeace Thackeray

Let us be very gentle with our neighbors’ failings, and forgive our friends their debts as we hope ourselves to be forgiven.

Character | Hope | Forgive | Friends |

Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to preserve. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends and soften to us our enemies. Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.

Character | Courage | Death | Fortune | Grace | Mind | Peril | Quiet | Strength | Friends |

Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.

Character | Family | Fortitude | Little | Man | Friends |

Ludovico Ariosto

I regret not death. I am going to meet my friends in another world.

Death | Regret | Wisdom | World | Friends |

Alonzo of Arragon NULL

Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, old books to read.

Books | Trust | Wisdom | Friends | Old |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

Opinion | Taste | Wisdom | Friends |