A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

—John D. Rockefeller, as quoted in Rodd Wagner & Gale Muller, The Power of 2 (2009), p. 35

There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.

–Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847; Reader’s Digest, 1984), p. 220

Reconciliations are the cement of friendship; therefore friends should quarrel to strengthen their attachment, and offend each other for the pleasure of being reconciled.

–Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), “The Noble Science of Self-Justification” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 153

An enemy [has] to remain a caricature if he [is] to be kept at a safe distance: an enemy should never come alive. The generals were right—no Christmas cheer ought to be exchanged between the trenches.

–Graham Greene, The Human Factor (1978), p. 203

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

–John Ames in Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004), 199

Perhaps more depressing than friendships changed by economic inequality are those having to do with inequality of cultural attainment. This becomes most poignant when it strikes at old friendships. The euphemism to cover this division is “we’ve grown apart in recent years,” when what is really meant is that one friend has developed wider interests, or has become more penetrating about the world, or has become more bookish than the other. When this occurs, all that old friends seem to talk about are former days, which is to say, the paradisiacal times when their interests, far from being divergent, were congruent.

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 147-8

Except on their deathbeds, men generally cannot tell other men how much they like them, or how much their friendship means to them. A man can do so, but at the risk of reducing the quality of the friendship.

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 120

Edward Shils used to say that there were four modes of education available in modern societies: schools, serious periodicals, new and used bookshops, and the intelligent conversation of friends.

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 84

“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 quoted by Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 80

In a highly child-centered society, where above all “attention must be paid” to children, friendship cannot hope to compete.

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 65