Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Friendship
To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Treat your friends for what you know them to be—regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.—Journal, 31 December 1851
We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.—Journal, June 1850
We love to talk with those who can make a good guess at us—not with those who talk to us as if we were somebody else all the while.—Journal, 9 September 1852
We never exchange more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue.—Journal, 23 October 1852
While my friend was my friend he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him, but when he became my enemy he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow.—Journal, after 11 September 1849
While we float here, far from that tributary stream on whose banks our Friends and kindred dwell, our thoughts, like the stars, come out of their horizon still; for there circulates a finer blood than Lavoisier has discovered the laws of,—the blood, not of kindred merely, but of kindness, whose pulse still beats at any distance and forever.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining.—Journal, 21 December 1851
Words should pass between friends as the lightning passes from cloud to cloud.—Journal, 20 March 1842
