All the best friendships are based on shared prejudice

"Friendships - and indeed most relationships - are measured in the closeness of hearts

Friendship is so important. The goal of a good friendship should be for life! To keep it for life! If you find a friendship, and it gives you a joy inside, a peace, and a freedom; keep that friendship for life. Through it all, you stay together. So many friendships are toxic, but the good ones are really good! I always tell my son this, I always say, a friend is for life!

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because 'friends react on one another' and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

Jesus said several times, "Come, follow me." His was a program of "do what I do," rather than "do what I say." His innate brilliance would have permitted him to put on a dazzling display, but that would have left his followers far behind. He walked and worked with those he was to serve. His was not a long-distance leadership. He was not afraid of close friendships; he was not afraid that proximity to him would disappoint his followers. The leaven of true leadership cannot lift others unless we are with and serve those to be led.

There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates people. It is a poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations. It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.

It's better to have a few faithful friends than numerous shallow friendships.

It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.

Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called 'being in love' usually does not last. If the old fairy-tale ending 'They lived happily ever after' is taken to mean 'They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,' then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be 'in love' need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense - love as distinct from 'being in love' - is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be 'in love' with someone else. 'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. it is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

I enjoyed being involved in team sports and making close friendships.

The biggest lesson from Africa was that life's joys come mostly from relationships and friendships not from material things. I saw time and again how much fun Africans had with their families and friends and on the sports fields they laughed all the time.

It's easier to write from my own life and it's also more fun. I always write about relationships for instance whether they're romantic relationships friendships encounters... there's always a lesson to be learned from them.

The most successful marriages gay or straight even if they begin in romantic love often become friendships. It's the ones that become the friendships that last.

My friendships and relationships in the conservative world are not predicated on political correctness and enforced conformity of thought. They are based instead on mutual respect honesty and understanding - concepts many modern liberals should consider revisiting.

The Games are just a nice positive way to build friendships camaraderie and of course self-esteem. Plus the Games are a great opportunity for people to participate in sports who normally wouldn't.

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors friendships the poor man everywhere lies low.

To this day my mom's unsinkable spirit is an inspiration to me. For nearly thirty years she's worked at the Library of Congress. Everyone knows Sameha simply as 'Sami.' Along with 500 miles of shelved books her closest friendships are cataloged in that library. They are as much the value of work to my mom as is the work itself.

What makes a woman beautiful is her loyalty to and her friendships with other women and her honesty with men.

So I really did stop and change what I saw I was about and really try to put that principle into play as the center of everything - my friendships my marriage my career my family my way of being in the world. And that changed everything for me.

A man's friendships are like his will invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.

My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.

Never make friends with people who are above or below you in status. Such friendships will never give you any happiness.

I thought the more famous I became the more friendships I would have but the opposite was true.