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A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. In a great town friends are scattered, so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go farther and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude, to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness. Whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.
—Francis Bacon.
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And thou, my friend, whose gentle love
Yet thrills my bosom's chords,
How much thy friendship was above
Description's power of words.
—Lord Byron.
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As friendship must be founded on mutual esteem, it cannot long exist among the vicious. —Horace Smith.
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A friend is worth all the hazards we can run.