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Home  »  A Dictionary of Similes  »  Friendship

Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.

Friendship

The friendship of a great man is like the shadow of a bush, soon gone.
—Anonymous

The friendship of the ever-genial man is too often like a grate-fire, exceedingly bright to look at, but not reliable in so far as the dispensation of warmth on a really cold day is concerned.
—Anonymous

False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.
—Anonymous

As the Sun is in the Firmament, so is friendship in the world, a most divine and heavenly band.
—Robert Burton

The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.
—C. C. Colton

Friendship is less apparent when too nigh,
Like objects when they touch the eye.
—Abraham Cowley

As the harbour is the refuge of the ship from the tempest, so is friendship the refuge of man in adversity.
—Demophilus

Friendship, like love, is but a name,
Unless to one you stint the flame.—
The child whom many fathers share,
Hath seldom known a father’s care.
’Tis thus in friendship; who depend
On many, rarely find a friend.
—John Gay

Friendship is like a debt of honor; the moment it is talked of it loses its real name, and assumes the more ungrateful form of obligation.
—Oliver Goldsmith

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.
—Dr. Samuel Johnson

Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.
—Dr. Samuel Johnson

Friendshippe should be like the wine which Homer much commending, calleth Maroneum, whereof one pient [pint] being mingled with fiue quartes of water, yet it keepeth his old strength and vertue, not to be qualified by any discurtesie. Where salt doth grow nothing els can breede, where friendship is built, no offence can harbour.
—John Lyly

Houses are like friendship; there is hardly one in a thousand worth a long lease.
—Ouida

Friendship is like those ancient altars where the unhappy, and even the guilty, found a sure asylum.
—Madame Swetchine

Friendship is like rivers, and the strand of seas, and the air, common to all the world; but tyrants, and evil customs, wars, and want of love, have made them proper and peculiar.
—Jeremy Taylor

New friends, like one’s best coat and patent-leather boots, are only intended for holiday wear. At other times they are neither serviceable nor comfortable; they do not answer the required purposes, are ill adapted to give us the ease we seek. A new coat, however, has this advantage, that in time it will become old and comfortable; so much can by no means be predicted with certainty of a new friend.
—Anthony Trollope

Friendship—our friendship—is like the beautiful shadows of evening, spreading and growing till life and its light pass away.
—Mihaly Vitkovics

The friendship of the world is like the leaves falling from the trees in autumn; while the sap of maintenance lasts, friends swarm in abundance; but in the winter of our need they leave us naked.
—Arthur Warwick