Ralph Waldo Emerson Friendship Quotations

We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.

The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.

You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.

Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods.

Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! He offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first- born of the world are the competitors.

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the toughfibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

Almost every man we meet requires some civility,--requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion orphilanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.

I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine,--and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he ispraised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it might deify both.

I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.

Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.

The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself,I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of the individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.

Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.

In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.

Treat your friend as a spectacle.

We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit.

A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.

If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with blessings.

I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange ofgood offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.

For, when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of character, the most solid enjoyment.

There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?

Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expect everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate good. . . . If we will take the good we find, . . . we shall have heaping measures. . . .

I didn't find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.

Friendship buys friendship.

A friend is a person who goes around saying nice things about you behind your back.

Friends are like spaghetti, they should stick together. The only way to have a friend is to be one.

We take care of our health; we lay up money; we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all, -friends?

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used.

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

Love is like a hunter, who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness. Love is strongest in pursuit; friendship in possession....

We never touch but at points.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine

The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

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

It is one of the biggest blessing that you can be stupid with your true friends and behave like you shame to do elsewhere

Our chief want in life, is, someone who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great.

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

We talk of choosing our friends, but our friends are self-elected.

Keep your friendships in repair.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.