The Right to Expression....Friendship

Friendships make a full life.

A close friend is someone who understands you.

Friendship is a choice, which means that we may
choose a good friend or a bad friend.
Like love, friendship is a gamble of trust.

Society's pressure to have friends has always existed,
whether in a small town of the past or today's planet-wide 'social' media.
As with all Rights to a Right-full Life, one always has the choice
of this right, that is, a person has the right to not have friends, too,
and this choice should be upheld by the Right to Respect.

I declare the Right to Friendship.

So many people have made statements about Friendship!

 Here is a long list, courtesy of Brainy Quotes, where Friendship is a main category.

Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.Aristotle

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.Mencius

Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.Dag Hammarskjold

Friendship… is not something you learn in school.

But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.Muhammad Ali

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.Katherine Mansfield

I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod;

my shadow does that much better.Plutarch

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.Thomas A. Edison

I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend

who for me does not consult his calendar.Robert Brault

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought

into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.George MacDonald

If it’s very painful for you to criticize your friends – you’re safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that’s the time to hold your tongue.Alice Duer Miller

In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.Albert Schweitzer

It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them,

and important to friendship that we are not.Mignon McLaughlin

It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us,
as the confidence of their help.Epicurus

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.Ralph Waldo Emerson

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.John Leonard

It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.Marlene Dietrich

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners

 who make our souls blossom.Marcel Proust

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.Oprah Winfrey

Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.Emil Ludwig

Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends.Samuel Pepys

Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.Plautus

One’s friends are that part of the human race
with which one can be human.George Santayana

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.Toni Morrison

Silences make the real conversations between friends.

Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.Margaret Lee Runbeck

Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends,
never lose a chance to make them.Francesco Guicciardini

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.William Blake

The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.Elbert Hubbard

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.Henry David Thoreau

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.Henry David Thoreau

The only way to have a friend is to be one.Ralph Waldo Emerson

The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person?

Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?Eugene Kennedy

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized
than true friendship.Saint Thomas Aquinas

True friends stab you in the front.Oscar Wilde

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.Joseph Roux

When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do.

Think up something appropriate and do it.Edward W. Howe

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and
touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.Henri Nouwen


My thanks to all these people who have experienced and lived friendships
over the centuries--I couldn't say it better!


Revision:  thanks to commenters T., Y.A.