Some thoughts & quotes on love and friendship

I don't usually post personal things on the internet... it's easy enough to post journal type entries, recount experiences I've had, the places I've gone, but it is another thing altogether to bare one's soul on here for all to see. I don't want to venture too far down that path, but the issue of friendship vs. love has come up very recently for my sister and it's been very difficult. She's ending a relationship.

A little over a year ago, I was in the same predicament but on the flip side of things, I was the one told that the friendship was over... this is now giving me a whole new perspective, understanding and compassion for the one ending things. Seeing the agony my sister is going through in making the decision to end things and perhaps even harder, sticking to it. She wants to remain friends with the guy, but I wonder is that even possible? It doesn't seem to be in my circumstance, though I dearly wish it could because the friendship meant more than I can say.
Why is everything so very complicated?

Please forgive my musings... anyway, all that said and while on this topic, I thought I'd share these quotes about love and friendship. Some are simple, some profound ...I compiled these once and stumbled across them again this evening. I felt they were too good to keep to myself....

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We are all travelers in the wilderness of the world, and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one." ~ C.S. Lewis

We find rest in those we love, and we provide a resting place in ourselves for those who love us.
~ Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing ~ Katherine Mansfield

[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us. ~ Margaret Guenther

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. ~ Elie Wiesel

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
~ George Eliot

Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less
~ Rabbi Julius Gordon

The greatest happines of life is the conviction that we are loved-loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. ~ Victor Hugo

Love is always bestowed as a gift -- freely, willingly, and without expectation.... We don't love to be loved; we love to love. ~ Leo Buscaglia

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
~ Bertrand Russell, Earl Russell

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. ~ Peter Ustinov

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. ~ Anaïs Nin

Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that. Hatred paralyses life; love harmonises it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines it. ~ Marin Luther King

Love until it hurts. Real love is always painful and hurts; then it is real and pure.
~ Mother Teresa