Great Throughts Treasury

"Cheerfulness is the friend and helper of all good graces, and the absence of it is certainly a vice." - Arthur Aughey

"The best thing to give your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity." -

"The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity." - Clara Lucas Balfour

"No atheist, as such, can be a true friend." - W. O. Bentley, fully Walter Owen Bentley

"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." - Bias NULL

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

"Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is to be preferred." - Jean de La Bruyère

"More lightly do his sorrows press upon a man, when to a friend or fellow traveller he tells his griefs." - Callimachus NULL

"Free and fair discussion will ever be found the firmest friend to truth." - George Campbell

"We cannot enjoy a friend here. If we are to meet it is beyond the grave. How much of our soul a friend takes with him! We half die in him." - William Ellery Channing

"Words cannot express the joy which a friend imparts; they only can know who have experienced. A friend is dearer than the light of heaven, for it would be better for us that the sun were exhausted than that we should be without friends." - John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom

"Action is consolatory. It is the enemy; of thought and the friend of flattering illusions." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

"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." - Cyrus the Great, aka Cyrus the Elder, Cyrus II or Cyrus of Persia NULL

"A friend is not so much one to whom you can go for help when you are in trouble. That has its value. But a friend is one to whom you can go when he is in trouble." - L. O. Dawson

"To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him - two." - Norman Douglas, aka George Norman Douglas

"Friendship is held to be the severest test of character. It is easy, we think, to be loyal to family and clan, whose blood is in our own veins. Love between man and woman is founded on the mating instinct and is not free from desire and self-seeking. But to have a friend, and to be true under any and all trials, is the mark of a man!" - Charles Alexander Eastman, first named Ohiyesa

"To act the part of a true friend requires more conscientious feeling than to fill with credit and complacency any other station or capacity in social life." - Sarah Ellis, fully Sarah Stickney Ellis

"No man can expect to find a friend without faults; nor can he propose himself to be so to another. Without reciprocal mildness and temperance there can be no continuance of friendship. Every man will have something to do for his friend, and something to bear with in him. The sober man only can do the first; and for the latter, patience is requisite. It is better for a man to depend on himself than to be annoyed with either a madman or a fool." - Owen Feltham

"It is a secret, well known to all great men, that by conferring an obligation they; do not always procure a friend, but are certain of creating many enemies." - Henry Fielding

"I am persuaded that he who is capable of being a bitter enemy can never possess the necessary virtues that constitute a true friend." -

"Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing." - Benjamin Franklin

"A simple heart will love all that is most precious on earth, husband or wife, parent or child, brother or friend, without marring its singleness; external things will have no attraction save inasmuch as they lead souls to Him; all exaggeration or unreality, affection and falsehood must pass away from such a one, as the dews dry up before the sunshine. The single motive is to please God, and hence arises total indifference as to what others say and think, so that words and actions are perfectly simple and natural, as in his sight." - N. Grou

"Be and continue poor, young man, while others around you grow rich by; fraud and disloyalty; be without place or power, while others beg their way upwards; bear the pain of disappointed hopes, while others gain their by; flattery; forego the gracious pressure of the hand, for which others cringe and crawl. Wrap yourself in your own virtue, and seek a friend and your daily bread. If you have, in such a course, grown gray; with unblenched honor, bless God and die." - Richard Heinzelmann

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

"Probably the most neglected friend you have is you." - L. Ron Hubbard, fully Lafayette Ron Hubbard

"Because I am the only person I will have a relationship with all of my life, I choose: To love myself the way I am now. To always acknowledge that I am enough just the way I am. To love, honor and cherish myself. To be my own best friend. To be the person I would like to spend the rest of my life with. To always take care of myself so that I can take care of others. To always grow, develop and share my love and life." - Ron and Mary Hulnick, formally H. Ronald Hulnick and

"When a man feel the reprehension of a friend seconded by his own heart, he is easily heated into resentment." -

"To doubt is an injury; to suspect a friend is breach of friendship; jealousy is a seed sown but in vicious minds; prone to distrust, because apt to deceive." - George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne

"Depend on no man, on no friend but him who can depend on himself. He only who acts conscientiously toward himself, will act so toward others." - Johann Kaspar Lavater

"If you want to make a dangerous man your friend, let him do you a favor." - Lewis Edward Lawes

"Instead of a gem or a flower, cast the gift of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend." - George William McDonald

"Conscience is justice’s best minister; it threatens, promises, rewards, and punishes and keeps all under control; the busy must attend to its remonstrances, the most powerful submit to its reproof, and the angry endure its upbraidings. While conscience is our friend all is peace; but if once offended farewell the tranquil mind." - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

"A disciplined conscience is a man's best friend. It may not be his most amiable, but it is his most faithful monitor." - Austin Phelps

"Every man, however wise, needs the advice of some sagacious friend in the affairs of life." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

"If you lend a person any money, it becomes lost for any purpose as one’s own. When you ask for it back again, you may find a friend made an enemy by your kindness. If you begin to press still further, either you must part with that which you have intrusted, or else you must lose that friend." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

"It does not good to offer consoling words to a man in distress; his real friend in a pinch is a friend in deed, when deeds are needed." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

"Trust not yourself; but your defects to know. Make use of every friend - and every foe." - Alexander Pope

"If any speak ill of thee, flee home to thy own conscience, and examine thy heart: if thou be guilty, it is a just correction; if not guilty, it is a fair instruction: make use of both; so shalt thou distill honey out of gall, and out of an open enemy create a secret friend." - Francis Quarles

"Each departed friend is a magnet that attracts us to the next world." -

"We learn our virtues from the friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection." -

"He who begins to be your friend because it pays will also cease because it pays." -

"A friend is someone who allows you distance, but is never far away." - Noah benShea

"Man is a spiritual being in that - unless he is badly corrupted - he responds powerfully to non-material stimuli: the beauty in nature or in art, the trust of children, the needs of helpless people, the death of a friend even though long absent." -

"Conscience warns us as a friend before it punishes as a judge." - Stanislaw I, born Stanisław Leszczyński, also spelled Stanislaus NULL

"No man is useless while he has a friend." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

"The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

""What did God ever make such a world for anyway?" one young person complained, adding, "I could make a better world than this myself." "That", a friend suggested, " is just the reason God put you into this world - to make it a better world. Now go ahead and do your part."" -

"If choosing freely for oneself is the highest value, the free choice to wear red socks is as valuable as the free choice to murder one’s father or sacrifice oneself for one’s friend. Such a belief is ridiculous." - Mary Warnock, fully Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock

"The enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed... I think the enemy comes to us with the face of innocence and says to us: “I am your friend.”" - Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe

"Solitude has a healing consoler, friend, companion: it is work." - Berthold Auerbach