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.”
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem:
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart.
Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest for his feet.
Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love.
As the yellow gold is tried in fire, so the faith of friendship must be seen in adversity.
To desire the same things and to reject the same things, constitutes true friendship.