These quotes about loyalty will help you understand the true meaning of commitment
56 Loyalty Quotes That Will Help Build Honesty and Trust
Updated on Dec. 17, 2024
Loyalty is a very important part of meaningful relationships—it’s a strong foundation for trust, honesty, and caring. Your loyalty, when it’s earned, is one of the most valuable things you can give someone. Loyalty is also a two-way street, and you should give and expect loyalty in equal measure. Plus, as these leadership quotes demonstrate, loyalty is also an important quality in those in charge. If you’re looking for some more inspiration, these loyalty quotes should do the trick. Read on for quotes about loyalty and why it takes such strength.
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Short quotes about loyalty
1. “Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” —J.R.R. Tolkien
2. “You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day by day.” —Jeffrey Gitomer
3. “The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love, and loyalty.” —Zig Ziglar
4. “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.” —W. H. Murray
5. “A man is not an orange. You can’t eat the fruit and throw the peel away.” —Arthur Miller
6. “My whole thing is loyalty. Loyalty over royalty; word is bond.” —Fetty Wap
7. “Loyalty is my motto. When I give my word, you can trust me.” —Philippa Gregory
8. “I’ll take fifty percent efficiency to get one hundred percent loyalty.” —Samuel Goldwyn
9. “If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.” —Elbert Hubbard
10. “I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me—they, and the love and loyalty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could.” —Veronica Roth
11. “Now everyone dreams of a love faithful and true, but you and I know what this world can do. So let’s make our steps clear so the other may see. And I’ll wait for you…should I fall behind wait for me.” —
12. “Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon; you don’t score points for past action.” —Natasha Pulley
Quotes on loyalty and friendship
13. “Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.” —Ann Landers
14. “Anything is possible when you have the right people there to support you.” —Misty Copeland
15. “Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.” —Erica Jong
16. “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
17. “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
18. “Without loyalty there can be no love. Without loyalty, there can be no family. Without loyalty, there can be no friendship. Without loyalty, there can be no commitment to community or country.” —Eric Felten
19. “What I value most in my friends is loyalty.” —David Mamet
20. “Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair.” —Dean Koontz
21. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
22. “I’m the nicest, most loyal person in the world when it comes to my friends. I would really do almost anything to make sure they’re happy. But I only want friends who are there for me just like I’m there for them. Otherwise, it’s too painful.” —Paris Hilton
23. “I have a loyalty that runs in my bloodstream, when I lock into someone or something, you can’t get me away from it because I commit that thoroughly. That’s in friendship, that’s a deal, that’s a commitment….If you shake my hand, that’s for life.” —Jerry Lewis
24. “There’s nothing like a really loyal, dependable, good friend. Nothing.” —Jennifer Aniston
25. “I think a good friend, to me, is all about trust and loyalty. You don’t ever want to second-guess whether you can tell your friend something.”
26. “A person who deserves my loyalty receives it.” —Joyce Maynard
27. “There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends.” —Jane Austen
28. “Loyalty to a friend is a virtue—perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.” —Milan Kundera
29. “A friend is someone who walks into a room when everyone else is walking out.” —Gary W. Moore
30. “Loyalty and friendship, which is to me the same, created all the wealth that I’ve ever thought I’d have.” —Ernie Banks
Quotes on loyalty and family
31. “The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.” —Mario Puzo
32. “…it isn’t things and proximity, or even blood that holds us all together. What makes a family is love and loyalty.” —Genevieve Dewey
33. “So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty.” —Haniel Long
Quotes about loyalty and leadership
34. “Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty down.” —Grace Hopper
35. “Being loyal to those who are absent and assuming good faith of others are keys to building trust in a culture. The ultimate test of principle-centered leadership is to be loyal to people who are absent when their names come up in conversations and meetings. When other people are not with you, they’re in the dark they don’t know what’s happening, what you’re saying about them, and whether you are loyal to them. And that’s when you show your true character.” —Stephen Covey
36. “Never value anything as profitable that compels you to break your promise, to lose your self-respect.” —Marcus Aurelius Antonius
37. “Employee loyalty begins with employer loyalty. Your employees should know that if they do the job they were hired to do with a reasonable amount of competence and efficiency, you will support them.” —Harvey Mackay
Quotes on loyalty and commitment
38. “The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.” —Rollo May
39. “We have to recognize that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.” —Cornel West
40. “Real love has little to do with falling. It’s a climb up the rocky face of a mountain, hard work, and most people are too selfish or too scared to bother. Very few reach the critical point in their relationship that summons the attention of the light and the dark, that place where they will make a commitment to love no matter what obstacles-or temptations- appear in their path.” —
41. “When confronted with a challenge, the committed heart will search for a solution. The undecided heart searches for an escape.” —Andy Andrews
42. “If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.” —
Thought-provoking quotes about loyalty
43. “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
44. “Sometimes we’re loyal to more than one thing. When there’s a conflict, we have to choose which loyalty to honor.” —Claudia Gray
45. “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
46. “Very often the test of one’s allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.” —Christopher Hitchens
47. “The whole point of loyalty was not to change: stick with those who stuck with you.” —Larry McMurtry
48. “Unless you can find some sort of loyalty, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.” —Josiah Royce
49. “The scholar does not consider gold and jade to be precious treasures, but loyalty and good faith.” —Confucius
50. “Loyalty means giving me your honest opinion, whether you think I’ll like it or not.” —General Colin Powell
51. “Where there is loyalty, weapons are of no use.” —Paulo Coelho
52. “And the strongest trust is built by the smallest actions, the keeping of the little promises. It is the constant truthfulness, the continued dependability, the remembrance of minor things, which most inspire confidence and faith.” —Walter Wangerin Jr.
53. “If by my life or death I can protect you, I will.” —J.R.R. Tolkien
54. “As I’m getting older, I’m really learning unconditional love and loyalty are extremely important.” —Bindi Irwin
55. “I place an enormous premium on loyalty. If someone betrays me, I can forgive them rationally, but emotionally I have found it impossible to do so.” —Richard E. Grant
56. “Without commitment, you cannot have depth in anything, whether it’s a relationship, a business or a hobby.” —
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite quotes for over 100 years. The sayings and quips that appear in the magazine’s “Quotable Quotes” (formerly “Remarkable Remarks”) are curated from interviews and essays originally published in the magazine, reprints from trusted titles and other verified sources. For this piece, Meghan Jones tapped her experiences as a lifestyle editor for Reader’s Digest to ensure that all information is accurate. We’ve gone the extra step and had Marcy Lovitch, a fact-checker with 20-plus years of experience researching for national publications including Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Glamour, Seventeen, Real Simple, Forbes and InStyle magazines, verify that all quotes are attributed correctly and have credible sourcing. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
