A Quote by William Hazlitt

Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.

William Hazlitt

Quote Topics

Amusement Esteem Even Friendship Implies Interest Mutual Regard Seldom Vanity Want

Quote Author

William Hazlitt
English - Critic
April 10, 1778 - September 18, 1830

There is a mutual interest between Israel and the United States of America. It is more than friendship - it is friendship plus mutual interest, and it is bipartisan.

Tzipi Livni

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

H. L. Mencken

The way to make a true friend is to be one. Friendship implies loyalty, esteem, cordiality, sympathy, affection, readiness to aid, to help, to stick, to fight for, if need be. ... Radiate friendship and it will return sevenfold.

B. C. Forbes

Friendship is a calm and sedate affection, conducted by reason and cemented by habit; springing from long acquaintance and mutual obligations, without jealousies or fears, and without those feverish fits of heat and cold, which cause such an agreeable torment in the amorous passion.

David Hume

Ties of blood are not always ties of friendship; but friendship founded on merit, on esteem, and on mutual trust, becomes more vital and more tender when strengthened by the ties of blood.

Lord Chesterfield

We value the devotedness of friendship rather as an oblation to vanity than as a free interchange of hearts; an endearing contract of sympathy, mutual forbearance, and respect!

Jane Porter

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.

H. L. Mencken

To what gods is sacrificed that rarest and sweetest thing upon earth, friendship? To vanity and to interest.

Guillaume-Chretien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes

Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more wholeheartedly than they, invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider how narrow its true path is. Is must not become what the people call a "mutual admiration society"; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration, of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.

C. S. Lewis

Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time. The very reverse may be said of love. In a great degree, love and friendship cannot subsist in the same bosom; even when inspired by different objects they weaken or destroy each other, and for the same object can only be felt in succession. The vain fears and fond jealousies, the winds which fan the flame of love, when judiciously or artfully tempered, are both incompatible with the tender confidence and sincere respect of friendship.

Mary Wollstonecraft

War implies a lack of comprehension of mutual national interests; it means the undermining and even the end of culture.

Carlos Saavedra Lamas

By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it.

Florence Nightingale

Friendship is far more delicate than love. Quarrels and fretful complaints are attractive in the last, offensive in the first. And the very things which heap fewel on the fire of ardent passion, choke and extinguish sober and true regard. On the other hand, time, which is sure to destroy that love of which half certainly depends on desire, is as sure to increase a friendship founded on talents, warm with esteem, and ambitious of success for the object of it.

Hester Lynch Piozzi

Let us not speak of tolerance. This negative word implies grudging concessions by smug consciences. Rather, let us speak of mutual understanding and mutual respect.