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Old friends and old wine are best.

"Old tunes are sweetest, and old friends are surest," says Claud Halcro. "Old be your fish, your oil, your friend" (Italian).ssss1

One enemy is too many, and a hundred friends are too few.

Enmity is unhappily a much more active principle than friendship.

Save me from my friends!

An ejaculation often called forth by the indiscreet zeal which damages a man's cause whilst professing to serve it. The full form of the proverb—"God save me from my friends, I will save myself from my enemies"—is almost obsolete amongst us, but is found in most languages of the continent, and is applied to false friends. Bacon tells us that "Cosmos, Duke of Florence, was wont to say of perfidious friends that we read we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read we ought to forgive our friends."

A full purse never lacked friends.

An empty purse does not easily find one. To say that "The best friends are in the purse" (German),ssss1 is, perhaps, putting the matter a little too strongly; but, at all events, "Let us have florins, and we shall find cousins" (Italian).ssss1 "The rich man does not know who is his friend."ssss1 This Gascon proverb may be taken in a double sense: the rich man's friends are more than he can number; he cannot be sure of the sincerity of any of them. "He who is everybody's friend is either very poor or very rich" (Spanish).ssss1 "Now that I have a ewe and a lamb everybody says to me, 'Good day, Peter'" (Spanish).ssss1 Everybody looks kindly on the thriving man.