If it’s very painful for you to criticize your friends — you’re safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that’s the time to hold your tongue.
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small it takes time — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.
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.
The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy.
If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.
Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
