This past Sunday, Todd Lester introduced his message series for the next four weeks – Helping My Friends Through Tough Times. Here is a collection of quotes on friendship and what it means to be a good friend when the going gets rough.
“When you’re drowning, you don’t say ‘I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me.’ You just scream.”
– John Lennon
“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.”
– George Washington
“It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.”
– Epicurus, Greek philosopher
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“When true friends meet in adverse hour;
‘Tis like a sunbeam through a shower.
A watery way an instant seen,
The darkly closing clouds between.”
– Sir Walter Scott
“Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.”
– Henry Ford
“Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannot congeal in winter.”
– James Fenimore Cooper
“I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.”
– Henri Nouwen
“But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”
– Oprah Winfrey
“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.”
– Helen Keller
“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
– Albert Camus
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”
– C. S. Lewis
“I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”
– Plutarch
“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.”
– Alice Duer Miller
“It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.”
– Mignon McLaughlin
“It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.”
– Marlene Dietrich
“The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing… not healing, not curing… that is a friend who cares.”
– Henri Nouwen
“The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights.”
– Giotto di Bondone
“You can always tell a real friend: when you’ve made a fool of yourself he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.”
– Laurence J. Peter
“People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.”
– Plato