The best proof of love is trust

Now, what is the quality to look out for as a warrant for the stability and permanence of friendship? It is loyalty. Nothing that lacks this can be stable. We should also in making our selection look out for simplicity, a social disposition, and a sympathetic nature, moved by what moves us. These all contribute to maintain loyalty. You can never trust a character which is intricate and tortuous. Nor, indeed, is it possible for one to be trustworthy and firm who is unsympathetic by nature and unmoved by what affects ourselves. We may add, that he must neither take pleasure in bringing accusations against us himself, nor believe them when they are brought. All these contribute to form that constancy which I have been endeavouring to describe. And the result is, what I started by saying, that friendship is only possible between good men.

Two friends . . . there are stronger forces on earth, perhaps, but few as tenacious and enduring as the bond between true friends.

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.

Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

Life has shown me that strong friendships are most often the result of strong intentions. Your table needs to be deliberately built, deliberately populated, and deliberately tended to.

There is a comfort in the strength of love;
'Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart.

-<i>Michael: A Pastoral Poem</i>

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

But of all the bonds of fellowship, there is none more noble, none more powerful than when good men of congenial character are joined in intimate friendship.

The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.

To have a good friend is the purest of all God's gifts, for it is a love that has no exchange of payment. It is not inherited, as with a family. It is not compelling, as with a child. And it has no means of physical pleasure, as with a mate. It is, therefore, an indescribable bond that brings with it a far deeper devotion than all the others.

loving friendship is able to endure everything; it refuses no burden.

The best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship.