Marcus Tullius Cicero Friendship Quotations

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

A friend is, as it were, a second self.

The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.

Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion in vice.

Friendship is given us by nature, not to favor vice, but to aid virtue.

Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.

Never injure a friend, even in jest.

The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.

Friendship, on the other hand, serves a great host of different purposes all at the same time. In whatever direction you turn, it still remains yours. No barrier can shut it out. It can never be untimely; it can never be in the way. We need friendship all the time, just as much as we need the proverbial prime necessities of life, fire and water.

Loyalty is what we seek in friendship.

Friends are proved by adversity.

We rejoice in the joys of our friends as much as we do our own, and we are equally grieved at their sorrows. Wherefore the wise people will feel toward their friends as they do toward themselves, and whatever labor they would encounter with a view to their own pleasure, they will encounter also for the sake of their friends.

Friendship is infinitely better than kindness.

Nature loves nothing solitary, and always reaches out to something, as a support, which ever in the sincerest friend is most delightful.

Friendship makes prosperity brighter, while it lightens adversity by sharing its griefs and anxieties. [Lat., Secundas res splendidiores facit amicitia, et adversas partiens communicansque leviores.]

It is a common saying that many pecks of salt must be eaten before the duties of friendship can be discharged. [Lat., Vulgo dicitur multos modios salis simul edendos esse, ut amicitia munus expletum sit.]

The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret -- that man is black at heart: mark and avoid him.

Life is nothing without friendship.

Thus nature has no love for solitude, and always leans, as it were, on some support; and the sweetest support is found in the most intimate friendship.

Man's best support is a very dear friend.

Friendship makes prosperity more brilliant, and lightens adversity by dividing and sharing it.

He removes the greatest ornament of friendship who takes away from it respect.

To give and receive advice - the former with freedom, and yet without bitterness, the latter with patience and without irritation - is peculiarly appropriate to geniune friendship.

Friends, though absent, are still present.