DEFINITION OF FRIENDSHIP

ON THE FRIENDSHIP CAFÉ

What Is Friendship?

 “Friends should be few but good,” advises a Greek friendship proverb. In the same vein, a Jewish proverb states, "The good fellow to everyone is a good friend to no one." What these two proverbs emphasize is that it’s the quality and not the quantity that matters in the friendship game.

But having said that, what is friendship?

This is what you get for Definition of Friendship according to Expedia:

Friendship is a term used to denote co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more people. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteeem, and affection and respect along with a degree of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis. Friends will welcome each other's company and exhibit loyalty towards each other, often to the point of altruism. Their tastes will usually be similar and may converge, and they will share enjoyable activities. They will also engage in mutually helping behavior, such as exchange of advice and the sharing of hardship.

Here is the friendship definition according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 

Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who we are as persons. Given this centrality, important questions arise concerning the justification of friendship and, in this context, whether it is permissible to “trade up” when someone new comes along, as well as concerning the possibility of reconciling the demands of friendship with the demands of morality in cases in which the two seem to conflict.

Quotes about the Definition of Friendship
 

No one person can possibly combine all the elements supposed to make up what everyone means by friendship.
- Francis Marion Crawford

Friendship isn't a big thing - it's a million little things.
- Author Unknown

Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones.
- Baron de Montesquieu

Friendship is a furrow in the sand.
- Tongan Proverb

Friendship is love without his wings.
- Lord Byron

The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence above language.
- Henry David Thoreau

Friendship needs no words.
- Dag Hammarskjold

Friendship is a word the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm.
- Augustine Birrell

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

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.
- Oliver Goldsmith

Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister;
two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.
- Victor Hugo,

Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's notsomething you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.
- Muhammed Ali

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.
- Mencius

Discussing the characters and foibes of common friends is a great sweetener and cement of friendship.
- William Hazlitt

Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
- H. L. (Henry Lewis) Mencken 

Friendship . . . It's not about having friends, it's about being one.
Sacrificing your comforts and emotional stability to further improve theirs.
- Suzanne J, Starr

Friendship makes prosperity more brilliant, and lightens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
- Cicero (44 B.C.)

Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another.
- Eustace Budgell (1711)

Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?
- Thomas Jefferson

Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another.
- Eustace Budgell

Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.
- Aristotle

 

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