True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing. -Baltasar Gracian

Sonnet CXVI - Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
Admit impediments. Love is not love 
Which alters when it alteration finds, 
Or bends with the remover to remove: 
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; 
It is the star to every wandering bark, 
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. 
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle's compass come: 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 
If this be error and upon me proved, 
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 


"Prelude to a Kiss" by Josephine Wall

Antigone, Ode 3 - Sophocles
Love, unconquerable
Waster of rich men, keeper
Of warm lights and all-night vigil
In the soft face of a girl:
Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor!
Even the pure Immortals cannot escape you,
And mortal man, in his one day's dusk,
Trembles before your glory.

Surely you swerve upon ruin
The just man's consenting heart,
As here you have made bright anger
Strike between father and son -
And none has conquered but love!
A girls' glance working the will of Heaven:
Pleasure to her above who mocks us,
Merciless Aphrodite.

"Love's Passing" by Evelyn de Morgan

Sonnet XIX. - Shakespeare
WHEN in the chronicle of wasted time   
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,   
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme   
In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights;   
   
Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best 
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,   
I see their antique pen would have exprest   
Ev'n such a beauty as you master now.   
   
So all their praises are but prophecies   
Of this our time, all, you prefiguring; 
And for they look'd but with divining eyes,   
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:   
   
For we, which now behold these present days,   
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us. 
-Robert Louis Stevenson

Edmund Dulac

A loaf of bread beneath the tree,
A flask of wine, a book of verse,
And thou, beside me singing in the wilderness-
This wilderness were paradise enow!
-The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam

"Maiden Song" by Emma Florence Harrison

Her arms across her breast she laid; 
She was more fair than words can say: 
Bare-footed came the beggar maid 
Before the king Cophetua. 
In robe and crown the king stept down, 
To meet and greet her on her way; 
'It is no wonder,' said the lords, 
'She is more beautiful than day.' 

As shines the moon in clouded skies, 
She in her poor attire was seen: 
One praised her ancles, one her eyes, 
One her dark hair and lovesome mien. 
So sweet a face, such angel grace, 
In all that land had never been: 
Cophetua sware a royal oath: 
'This beggar maid shall be my queen!' 
-Tennyson