It's truly said that we attract our tribe. While one cannot choose their family, one can definitely choose their friends who are like family. And so, it is important to acknowledge the important role such friends play in our lives. From being our family away from home, our support system, our sounding board, and our guide, to the person we always go to first when things go wrong-- our friends play many different roles in our lives. To honour them, in India Friendship Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of August every year. And so, this year it is being celebrated on August 6, 2023. This is a day when we express our gratitude for having good friends in life and thank them for being an invaluable part of our lives. Over the years, many authors have written about the importance of having good friends and long-lasting friendships that would resonate with many people even today. Here we list down some such quotes by famous authors, which you can send to your friends on this Friendship Day. Read on to know more:
1. “The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.” — Barbara Kingsolver, “Stone Soup”
2. “Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.” —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
3. “Friendship…is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’” — CS Lewis, The Four Loves
4. “I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.” — AA Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
5. “The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.” — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
6. “Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.” ― Charles Lamb, The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb Volume 3
7. “The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
8. “Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.” ― Oscar Wilde
9. “The best mirror is an old friend.” ― George Herbert
10. “We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
11. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.” — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
12. “If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.” ― Alfred Tennyson
13. “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” ― Elbert Hubbard14. “What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” ― Aristotle
15. "A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow." – William Shakespeare
16. "Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes." – Friedrich Nietzsche
17. “Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything.” — Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
18. “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” ― Anais Nin
19. “If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky.” ― S.E. Hinton
20. “The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
21. “Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.” ― Dean Koontz
22. “She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.” — Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
23. “She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.” —Alice Walker, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart
24. “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” — Maya Angelou, I Shall Not Be Moved
25. “A good friend is a connection to life—a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.” —Lois Wyse, Women Make the Best Friends: A Celebration
