1

You could go up into the heavens, you could contemplate the whole nature of the world and the beauty of the stars from up there – but if you had no one to tell about it, your revelation would bring you no pleasure. Whereas if you did have someone, it would be the most wonderful thing ever.

• Archytas of Tarentum (430–355 BC), in Cicero, de Amicitia section 88

2

It is not good for man to be alone.

Genesis 2.18

3

Any human being is like a blob of sealing-wax that has been broken into two halves: each of us is just one half of an original whole, and there is only one other half out there that he will fit with. And he spends his whole life looking for that other half.

Aristophanes’ speech in Plato, Symposium 191d, 192e (paraphrased)

4

A friend is another self.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1166a31–32

5

Friendship can exist only between good men.

• Cicero, de Amicitia 18

6

Only make friends with those who are better persons than you are.

Confucius, Analects 19.3

7

Someone with too many friends must be friendly to all of them; but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Proverbs 18.24

8

How good it is for brothers and sisters to live together in unity!

Psalm 133.1

9

To talk together, to laugh together, to do each other kind services in turn, to read sweet-written books together, to joke together and to be serious together … this is what we love in our friends.

Augustine, Confessions 4.8–9

10

If someone pressed me to explain why I loved my friend, I could not express it any other way than by saying: ‘Because he is himself, because I am myself.’

Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Friendship’ (paraphrased)

11

A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little: Magna civitas, magna solitudo [great city, great aloneness]; because in a great town friends are scattered; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighbourhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections, is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.

Sir Francis Bacon, ‘Of Friendship’

12

Friend, n. One joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy.

Dr Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s Dictionary Online

13

14

Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

Oscar Wilde (Reference Wilde1894)

15

That outlook which values the collective above the individual necessarily disparages friendship; it is a relation between [people] at their highest degree of individuality.

C. S. Lewis (Reference Lewis1960, 57)

16

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

E. M. Forster (Reference Forster1939, 8)

17

Simon and Garfunkel, ‘Old Friends’

18

Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

John 15.13