20 Quotes About Friendship
The Stoics rated it among the highest goods; Ubuntu says we become ourselves through it. These quotes are about the people who make a life shareable.
“There are no permanent friends, no permanent enemies — only permanent interests.”
“Lift yourself by yourself; do not let yourself sink. For the self alone is the friend of the self, and the self alone is the enemy of the self.”
“The whole Gita is contained in two verses — 2.47 and 18.66. The first is how to act. The second is how to surrender. Together they are the entire path.”
“A friend asked me what I do for fun. I could not answer. I had not done anything for fun in years. That moment was the diagnosis I had been refusing.”
“In the old way, when one person in the family fell ill, the whole family came together to clean — because illness was understood to live in the broken relationships, not in the body alone.”
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
“The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”
“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.”
“Greed is a grievous sickness, of which there is no remedy. There is no relief for it. It is the destroyer of friends.”
“She is the daughter of Ra. She rides in the solar boat. The world is held together because she is at the heart of it.”
“The people who fared the best were the people who leaned into relationships, with family, with friends, with community.”
“When we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it was not their middle-age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships.”
“Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
“Without friends, no one would choose to live, even if he had all other goods.”
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
“Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?”
“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”
“A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good. They have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing they belong in a greater whole.”
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”