Words are easy like the wind, faithful friends are hard to find.

Status: Unsolved.  Maybe Shakespeare?

This is a tricky one, as it actually does come from The Passionate Pilgrim, a known Shakespeare source (albeit a less commonly cited one).  So at first glance you could easily make the case that this is a Shakespeare quote.

Here’s the problem — that collection is actually a bunch of smaller writings from a bunch of authors, and only a few of them have been identified as Shakespeare:

First published by William Jaggard in 1599, this collection of poems, in its entirety, is commonly attributed to Shakespeare. However, a number of the poems were written by others including Richard Barnfield, Bartholemew Griffin, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Walter Raleigh. Shakespeare has been identified as the author of five poems: numbers I, II, III, V, and XVII.

The quote in question comes from poem #21.  Strangely enough, when googling for details on this particular poem I actually landed on myself (via ShakespeareGeek.com).

One thought on “Words are easy like the wind, faithful friends are hard to find.

  1. This is actually considered poem #20 in modern editions. It was written by Richard Barnfield, first published by Jaggard’s brother in 1598 (see “The Compete Sonnets and Poems: The Oxford Shakespeare,” edited by Colin Burrow, p. 167).

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