As William Shakespeare famously said, “This above all: to thine own self be true.” And, it can also be said, be true and loyal to those nearest and dearest to you. Whether you’re looking for a sweet quote to include on a friendship card or feel betrayed by a loved one and are seeking words of comfort, these phrases are powerful reminders of the foundational roles of trust and loyalty in our lives. (To really dig deep, round out your reading by scoping out 80 questions to ask your friends to get to know them on a deeper level and 50 affirmations to help you on your self-love journey.)
Trust, and its enduring companion, loyalty, give us strength when we’re feeling down and motivate us to stick to the causes and by the people that matter most. Ahead, this curated collection of inspirational quotes (with some funny ones thrown in the mix, because, hey, Elizabeth Taylor sure was right with “you find out who your real friends are when you’re involved in a scandal”) will be your faithful friends on good days and bad. So trust your heart, and trust this assortment of moving loyalty and trust quotes to capture the beauty of belief.
- “Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, / Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man.” — William Shakespeare
- “It is not book learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do a thing — ‘carry a message to Garcia.’” — Elbert Hubbard
- “Whispering from her towers [Oxford] the last enchantments of the Middle Age…Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!” — Matthew Arnold
- “In thy face I see / the map of honor, truth and loyalty.” ― William Shakespeare
- “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.” ― President John F. Kennedy
- “The modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.” ― Mark Twain
- “There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”― Jane Austen
- “When will women begin to have the first glimmer that above all other loyalties is the loyalty to Truth, i.e., to yourself, that husband, children, friends and country are as nothing to that.” — Alice James
- “Before you trust a man, eat a peck of salt with him.” — Proverb and adage originating before Cicero, who quotes a version of it in “De Amicitia”
- “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face: / He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust.” ― William Shakespeare
- “We have a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over thirty.” ― Jack Weinberg
- “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” ― Henry David Thoreau
- “‘Loyalty is my motto. When I give my word, you can trust me.’” ― Philippa Gregory
- “I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray.” ― Albert Camus
- “If by my life or death I can protect you, I will. ” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
- “I don’t like to give up on people when they need someone not to give up on them.” ― Carroll Bryant
- “Trust is earned, respect is given, and loyalty is demonstrated. Betrayal of any one of those is to lose all three.” ― Ziad K. Abdelnour
- “You find out who your real friends are when you’re involved in a scandal.” ― Elizabeth Taylor
- “Loyalty is the pledge of truth to oneself and others.” ― Ada Velez-Boardley
- “Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.” — Samuel Butler
- “A healthy loyalty is not passive and complacent, but active and critical.” — Harold Laski
- “Unless you can find some sort of loyalty, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.” ― Josiah Royce
- “A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.” ― Walter Winchell
- “Be with a leader when he is right, stay with him when he is still right, but, leave him when he is wrong.” ― Abraham Lincoln
- “It isn’t an easy thing to give your loyalty to someone you don’t know, especially when that person chooses to reveal nothing of himself.” ― Megan Whalen Turner
- “Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.”― Neil Gaiman
- “As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.” ― Margaret Atwood
- “You stand up for your teammates. Your loyalty is to them. You protect them through good and bad, because they’d do the same for you.” ― Yogi Berra
- “Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon, you don’t score points for past action.” ― Natasha Pulley
- “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” ― William Shakespeare,
- “I will love you as an oven loves malfunctioning in the middle of roasting a turkey.” ― Lemony Snicket
- “One never knows how loyalty is born.” ― Robert Morse as Bertram Cooper on “Mad Men”
- “Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty down.” ― Grace Murray Hopper
- “Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved.” — Martin Luther
- “One owes loyalty, only, to those who demonstrate in kind.” ― T.F. Hodge
- “There’s nothing like a really loyal, dependable, good friend. Nothing.” — Jennifer Aniston
- “Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.”― Sinclair Ferguson
- “We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.” — G.K. Chesterton
- “The whole point of loyalty was not to change: stick with those who stuck with you.” ― Larry McMurtry
- “You can’t be loyal to others if you’re not loyal to your own nature first.” ― Tor Seidler
- “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” ― Warren Buffett
- “Better to trust the man who is frequently in error than the one who is never in doubt.” ― Eric Sevareid
- “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” ― Albert Einstein
- “Be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, you build the trust of those who are present.” — Stephen Covey
- “If you have three people in your life that you can trust, you can consider yourself the luckiest person in the whole world.” — Selena Gomez
- “Trust that man in nothing who has not a conscience in everything.” ― Laurence Sterne
- “I wonder men dare trust themselves with men.” ― William Shakespeare
- “Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” ― Dr. Benjamin McLane Spock
- “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, / With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, / Steel-true and blade-straight, / The great artificer / Made my mate.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
- “He calls his extravagance, generosity; and his trusting everybody, universal benevolence.” ― Oliver Goldsmith
- “Love all, trust a few, / Do wrong to none.” ― William Shakespeare
- “Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things ― old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.” ― Francis Bacon
- “Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.” ― Henry Clay
- “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” ― Ernest Hemingway
- “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The best proof of love is trust.” ― Joyce Brothers
- “Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved.” ― William P. Young
- “It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” ― Samuel Johnson
- “Trust is built with consistency.” ― Lincoln Chafee
- “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.” ― Maya Angelou
- “To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.” ― George MacDonald
- “Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.” ― Doris Lessing
- “She raised one leg and gave me all her weight as I dipped her. She either trusted me or wanted to fall.” ― John Green
- “You have to trust or you’re only living half a life.” ― J.D. Robb
- “Loyalty will always be found in the things you regret because it mattered.” ― Shannon L. Alder
- “I am obliged to be loyal. Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice. Loyalty means that you ought to be ready to sacrifice every interest that you have, and your life itself, if your country calls upon you to do so.” ― President Woodrow Wilson
- “The most valuable gift you can receive is an honest friend.” ― Stephen Richards
- “It takes a loyal gardener to tend roses.” ― Sondra Faye
- “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Loyalty and friendship, which is to me the same, created all the wealth that I’ve ever thought I’d have.” — Ernie Banks
- “Loyalty and devotion lead to bravery. Bravery leads to the spirit of self-sacrifice. The spirit of self-sacrifice creates trust in the power of love.” ― Morihei Ueshiba
- “I always think loyalty’s such a tiresome virtue.” ― Agatha Christie
- “Loyalty cannot be blueprinted. It cannot be produced on an assembly line. In fact, it cannot be manufactured at all, for its origin is the human heart-the center of self-respect and human dignity. It is a force which leaps into being only when conditions are exactly right for it-and it is a force very sensitive to betrayal.” — Maurice R. Franks
- “Trust your instincts, and make judgments on what your heart tells you. The heart will not betray you.” ― David Gemmell
- “Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
- “Loyalty publicly results in leverage privately.” ― Andy Stanley
- “You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day by day.” ― Jeffrey Gitomer
- “We have to distrust each other. It’s our only defense against betrayal.” ― Tennessee Williams
- “‘It was a mistake,’ you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.” ― David Levithan
- “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” ― William Blake
- “Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime.”― Mineko Iwasaki
- “You see, you closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too ― even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.” ― Mitch Albom
- “When I consider life, ‘ is all a cheat; / Yet fool’d with hope, men favor the deceit; / Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay. / To-morrow’s falser than the former day.” ― John Dryden
- “Suspicion all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes, / For treason is but trusted like the fox.” ― William Shakespeare
- “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.” ― Michel de Montaigne
- “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ― Albert Camus
- “Believe a woman or an epitaph, / Or any other thing that’s false, before / You trust in critics.” ― George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron
- “Believe in your heart that you’re meant to live a life full of passion, purpose, magic and miracles.” ― Roy T. Bennett
- “Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle.” ― Christian D. Larson
- The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. ― President Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “Be brave to stand for what you believe in even if you stand alone.” ― Roy T. Bennett
- “Loyalty…When I think of it, I wonder if I would rather have it than love. Whereas love is often an over-used word and an unpredictable feeling, the other is nothing but dependability.” — Donna Lynn Hope
- “You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.” ― Jodi Picoult
- “Trust, but verify.” —A rhyming Russian proverb popularized by President Ronald Reagan
- “Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s.” ― Billy Wilder
- “A person who deserves my loyalty receives it.” — Joyce Maynard
- “Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.” ― Cheryl Strayed
- “Semper Fidelis.” ― Marine Corps motto
