Friendship & Community

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha Dhammapada & Sutta Pitaka

Fortunate is he who does not carry envy as a companion.

Rumi Masnavi & Divan-e Shams

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil

Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus & Notebooks

The individuals of the contemporary generation are fearful of existence ... only in great masses do they dare to live, and they cluster together en masse in order to feel that they amount to something.

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or & Journals

He speaks to me as no other philosopher does, direct and in his own human voice, a fellow spirit, a penetratingly perceptive friend, with a hand on my elbow and a twinkle in his eye. Although I frequently do not agree with what he says, I always listen to him.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena

[Spinoza] — the philosopher whom I trust most,... [Original in German: Der Philosoph, dem ich zumeist vertraue,...]

Baruch Spinoza Ethics (Ethica)

Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend.

Michel de Montaigne Essais

Men fed upon meat, and drinking strong drinks, have all an impoisoned and acrid blood which drives them mad in a hundred different ways. Their main insanity express in the fury of shed the blood of his brothers and to devastate fertile lands to rule over cemeteries.

Voltaire Candide & Philosophical Dictionary

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

William Shakespeare First Folio & Sonnets

A charming fellow, and so clever: he models himself on me.

Oscar Wilde De Profundis & Essays

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

Mark Twain Notebooks & Autobiography

The only way to have a good friend is to be one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Henry David Thoreau Walden

[Gandhi] was harsh on the polemical but non-violent Swami Shraddhananda, and kind to the Swami’s murderer, about whom he stated in public: ‘Abdul Rashid is my brother.’

Mahatma Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth

I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

That is simple my friend: because politics is more difficult than physics.

Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions

Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love.

Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali & Stray Birds

Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.

Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.

Hannah Arendt The Human Condition

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

Simone de Beauvoir The Ethics of Ambiguity

What was best in the Cynic doctrine passed over into Stoicism, which was an altogether more complete and rounded philosophy.

Bertrand Russell The Conquest of Happiness

There cannot be friendship without equality.

Swami Vivekananda Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Sun Tzu The Art of War

Friendship makes prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.

Cicero De Officiis & Tusculan Disputations

To my God a heart of flame; To my fellow man a heart of love; To myself a heart of steel.

Augustine of Hippo Confessions