Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
George Santayana

Good friends are good for your health.
Irwin Sarason

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
Sydney Smith

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

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.
Walter Winchell

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf, Bernard, in The Waves, 1931; repr. 1943, p. 189

"A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself."
(James Douglas Morrison, lead singer of The Doors)

"A friendship that exacts oneness of opinion and conduct is not worth much."
(Mohandas Gandhi, In Search of the Supreme)

"A true friend stabs you in the front."
(Oscar Wilde)