“I confess I should be glad to meet with some good company in my way, but I had rather go alone than with bad.”

Valuing peaceful isolation over superficial or harmful companionship · Essay, Of Solitude

• Choice
• Friendship
• Solitude

“Friendship demands honesty, even when the truth is uncomfortable.”

Original: Vennskap krever ærlighet, selv når sannheten er ubehagelig. — Underlines candor as the vital foundation of true friendship · Correspondence (Norwegian)

• Friendship
• Honesty
• Truth

“Here inside myself, you are blossoming despite the winter, and I have sunshine and warmth from you despite the distance.”

Original: Her inne hos meg blomstrer du tross vinteren, og jeg har solskinn og varme fra deg tross avstanden. — A warm reflection on how love and affection transcend both distance and cold seasons · Letter to Hans Christian Andersen (Norwegian)

• Friendship
• Love
• Warmth

“Friendship may sometimes step a few paces in advance of truth.”

Friendship's precedence over truth · Conversation / essay (as commonly attributed)

• Friendship
• Loyalty
• Truth

“Nothing could have given me greater pleasure than your note - not even your book itself.”

The pleasure of a personal letter · Letter to Leigh Hunt, 1845

• Friendship
• Letters
• Pleasure

“How delightful it is to see a friend after a length of absence! How delightful to chide him for that length of absence to which we owe such delight.”

The paradox of absence and reunion · Conversation / essay (as commonly attributed)

• Absence
• Delight
• Friendship

“Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after.”

Friendship destroyed by betrayal cannot be mended · Conversation / essay (as commonly attributed)

• Friendship
• Loss
• Trust

“He was in wonderful form, but has changed a good deal — he seems of much broader sympathies, much more human & simple. And his delight in the country, in walking, in the simplicities of life is enchanting.”

Dowson's warm observation of Oscar Wilde shortly after Wilde's release from prison · Letter to Conal O'Riordan, c. 10 June 1897

• Change
• Friendship
• Simplicity

“The other day I met Oscar & dined with him at his seaside retreat; I had some difficulty in suppressing my own sourness & attuning myself to his enormous joy in life just at this moment.”

A vivid contrast between Dowson's melancholy temperament and Oscar Wilde's renewed delight in life · Letter to Conal O'Riordan, c. 10 June 1897

• Character
• Friendship
• Joy

“I have begun to accept my limitations and will not pay you the sorry compliment of returning verses for your poem.”

Combining literary self-criticism with an elegant compliment to a fellow writer · Letter to Charles Sayle, November 1889

• Friendship
• Humility
• Writing

“I'm coming round soon for a good long gam.”

A characteristically Nantucket expression for a long friendly conversation · Conversation, recalled by William Alfred Hovey in Introduction to Poems (1905)

• Communication
• Friendship

“Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? in every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.”

Expressing the cumulative grief of surviving those we love · Letter to Jonathan Swift, 5 December 1732

• Friendship
• Grief
• Loss

“You will be surprised to hear from me again after a silence nearly three years long. The reason I write is because I have been dreaming about you and it has made me rather anxious.”

An intimate admission of how memory prompted him to renew an old connection · Letter to Lizzie Healy, 1917

• Dreams
• Friendship
• Memory

“Yes, poor Ireland is always in trouble. Though I am no Sinn Feiner and you are a Carsonite, Poor McDonagh and Pearse were two of my best friends, and now they are dead, shot by England.”

Personal grief cuts across the political divisions surrounding the Easter Rising · Letter to Bob Christie, May 1916

• Friendship
• Grief
• Politics

“I would rather have one honest friend than most of the friends that I have known.”

Placing sincerity above the number or social usefulness of friendships · Letter to Ivan Kashkin, 19 August 1935

• Friendship
• Sincerity
• Trust

“Sympathy is dear—very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me.”

Expressing the special depth of understanding she felt between fellow poets · Letter to Robert Browning, 11 January 1845

• Communication
• Friendship
• Poetry

“In private & in public, I hold by one who held by me when I was down; and I can tell you, that leads me not seldom into warfare.”

Describing loyalty as an obligation that sometimes demands conflict · Letter to William Hepworth Dixon, 1865

• Courage
• Friendship
• Trust

“Set me down as a fool if you like, but never doubt the friendship which makes me subscribe myself, yours always.”

Putting personal loyalty above pride or reputation · Letter to George R. Sims

• Friendship
• Humility
• Trust

“A letter from you stands in the place of all these.”

Written after saying he lacked company, pleasure and spirits, revealing how much he valued a friend's correspondence · Letter to William Mason, 13 January 1758

• Communication
• Friendship
• Solitude

“If ever two people, who love one another, come to breaking, it is for want of a timely eclaircissement, a full and precise one, without witnesses or mediators.”

Urging direct and honest communication before misunderstandings damage affection · Letter to Horace Walpole, November 1747

• Communication
• Friendship
• Love

“Sergey Nikolayevich, there are not many of us old acquaintances left now.”

Original: Сергей Николаевич! нас, старых знакомых, теперь немного осталось. — A spare acknowledgement of age and the steadily thinning circle of old friends. · Conversation with Sergey Glinka, recalled in contemporaries’ memoirs (Russian)

• Age
• Friendship
• Mortality

“Love is pictured with a blindfold; friendship removes it, looking carefully before it chooses.”

Original: Любовь пишется с завязанными глазами; но у дружества снимается сия завязка; дружество рассматривает прежде, нежели избирает. — A neat distinction between love's blindness and friendship's more deliberate judgement. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

• Friendship
• Love
• Wisdom

“Friendship, then, should rest on the strongest foundation: respect, strengthened by knowledge of another's worth, a foundation that cannot be shaken.”

Original: Итак, должно утверждать дружество на крепчайшем основании; почтение, подкрепляемое знанием достоинств; вот основание, которое никогда не может поколебаться. — He makes lasting friendship depend on informed respect rather than passing affection. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

• Character
• Friendship
• Respect

“In friendship, as in love, we should guard feeling and taste from growing dull; such caution is permissible.”

Original: В дружбе, как в любви, должно щадить чувства и вкус от притупления: сия предосторожность позволена. — Friendship, like love, needs care if familiarity is not to blunt feeling. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

• Care
• Friendship
• Love