An old friend never can be found, and nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost.
The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef, love, like being enlivened with champagne.
It is foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife.
No man is much pleased with a companion who does not increase, in some respect, his fondness of himself.
If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone.
Always set high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.
Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.
Friendship is a union of spirits, a marriage of hearts, and the bond there of virtue.
That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind; not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.
Men only become friends by community of pleasures.
The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.
Friendship, peculiar boon of Heaven, The noble mind's delight and pride, To men and angels only given, To all the lower world denied.
The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.
Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.
That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.
It is by studying little things that we attain the great knowledge of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.
Such is the state of life that none are happy but by the anticipation of change. The change itself is nothing; when we have made it the next wish is to change again.
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.