Friendship Quotes
“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” is credited to Sun Tzu, and sometimes to Machiavelli or Petrarch. Wikiquote traces the wording most directly to a line spoken by Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II. It is flagged here as misattributed.
“Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies” is flagged too. It is credited to Voltaire, and to the Maréchal de Villars. One French source puts the words in the mouth of Gourville, a man writing as an exile.
For the sourced quotes, try Sydney Smith: “Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence” (from his memoir, 1855). Or Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), where old friends are always best, “’less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of.”
'Thou canst not joke an Enemy into a Friend; but thou may'st a Friend into an Enemy.
There are three faithful friends,
an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.
It is a maxim of old that among themselves all things are common to friends.
“I sometimes think that ‘friend’ is just a word I use for all the people I haven't murdered yet.”
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
True happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice.
Pure friendship is something which men of an inferior intellect can never taste.
Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.
Unless you bear with the faults of a friend, you betray your own.