A Quote by Gore Vidal

It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends.

Gore Vidal

Quote Topics

Curious Enemies Friends His How Often

Quote Author

Gore Vidal
American - Writer
October 3, 1925 - July 31, 2012

No one should pay attention to a man delivering a lecture or a sermon on his "philosophy of life" until we know exactly how he treats his wife, his children, his neighbors, his friends, his subordinates and his enemies.

Sydney J. Harris

To accept Christ is to know the meaning of the words 'as he is, so are we in this world.' We accept his friends as our friends, his enemies as our enemies, his ways as our ways, his rejection as our rejection, his cross as our cross, his life as our life and his future as our future. If this is what we mean when we advise the seeker to accept Christ, we had better explain it to him. He may get into deep spiritual trouble unless we do.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Subtract from the great man all that he owes to opportunity, all that he owes to chance, and all that he gained by the wisdom of his friends and the folly of his enemies, and the giant will often be seen to be a pygmy.

Charles Caleb Colton

I'd been going to the Louvre since 1951. I thought I knew Paris and the French, but I didn't really. You know how easy it is to make friends when you are traveling. People are curious about you, you are curious about them. But you never really make friends that way. After the Louvre, I discovered that I have friends now because I have enemies.

I. M. Pei

When a virtuous man is raised, it brings gladness to his friends, grief to his enemies, and glory to his posterity.

Ben Jonson

A politician knows that his friends are not always his allies, and that his adversaries are not always his enemies.

Richard M. Nixon

President Lincoln was once criticized for his attitude toward his enemies. "Why do you try to make friends of them?" asked an associate. "You should try to destroy them." "Am I not destroying my enemies," Lincoln gently replied, "when I make them my friends?"

Abraham Lincoln

The good man has his enemies. He would not be like His Lord if he had not. If we were without enemies we might fear that we were not the friends of God, for friendship of the world is enmity to God.

Charles Spurgeon

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.

Honore de Balzac

A man who knows the court is master of his gestures, of his eyes and of his face; he is profound, impenetratable; he dissimulates bad offices, smiles at his enemies, controls his irritation, disguises his passions, belies his heartm speaks and acts against his feelings.

Jean de la Bruyere

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

Nicole Krauss

A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, his word is current in all countries; and all men, though his enemies, are made his friends and obey it as their own.