Friendship

“ He said that one friend was worth an army of lovers; that love is like wine—bright, beautiful, and intoxicating; but friendship is like the inexhaustible water of a pure fountain—clear, cool, and refreshing ”

“ Gifts the most precious, and gold cannot pay
For friendship once broken.
It’s vanished for aye!—
Keep clear the path to your friend’s heart, I pray!
Weeds of forgetfulness soon choke the way;
Pass that way often; keep polished, I pray,
The flagstones that guide you down friendship’s own way! ”

“ I wish therefore that my companion should be wiser and more experienced than myself, to confirm and support me; nor have I believed it impossible to find a true friend.”
“I agree with you,” replied the stranger, “in believing that friendship is not only a desirable, but a possible acquisition. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I——I have lost every thing, and cannot begin life anew.” ”

“ A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover rooted stays. I fancied he was fled, And, after many a year, Glowed unexhausted kindliness Like daily sunrise there. My careful heart was free again, — O friend, my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched, Through thee the rose is red, All things through thee take nobler form, And look beyond the earth, And is the mill-round of our fate A sun-path in thy worth. Me too thy nobleness has taught To master my despair; The fountains of my hidden life Are through thy friendship fair. ”

“ With how tender a gradation the first passion of delight in possession had softened into friendship, and the calm love of happily wedded people, and the delicious intimate camaraderie which springs of the unbroken companionship of board and bed, and the sharing of every little confidence of life! ”

“ I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. ”

“ You felt that it could give you the true grasp of friendship—that it had power to do more than barely cling to something—that it could both help and sustain, yet its touch would be gentleness itself beside the couch of suffering. ”

“ A smile comes to his face as he takes out an old letter and reads the last words she ever wrote to him, "Yet I stretch out my hands to you and say, again and again, Friendship is a bigger thing than Love!" ”

“ The compliment thus bestowed upon the sentiment of friendship is most deserved, and suggestive of the magic of its influence at every age, throughout every period of our existence; our life, properly speaking, opening with the birth of fancy and the affections, and maintaining its freshness only as we are under their sway. A friendship formed in childhood, in youth,—by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood,—becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. ”

“ Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. ”

“ In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
(For indeed I do not love it . . . you knew? you are not blind!
How keen you are!)
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you—
Without these friendships—life, what cauchemar! ”

“ When friends grow cold, and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and commonplace, these only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope, nor deserted sorrow. ”

“ I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. ”

“ Never, even in antiquity, have the claims of friendship been urged with such a passionate emphasis. The very resemblance of the two heroes is symbolic of their similarity of character; the very name of one of them is Friend pure and simple. The world is well lost for friendship’s sake on the one side, on the other nearest and dearest are willingly and literally sacrificed on the altar of friendship. ”

“ Every sentiment of honor, every sentiment of charity, every sentiment of high and sacred benevolence warns us, beseeches us, commands us to leave him undisturbed. That is real friendship, that is true friendship. ”

“ That is to say, there must be certain definite, formal acts, acts not made once for all, but repeated as often as opportunity is given; such form the cradle and nursery of friendship. In themselves they are not much—a grasp of the hand, a smile, a simple gift, a conventional salutation, a familiar talk about familiar things—but they introduce soul to soul, and through them each gives to the other his deepest self. ”

“ To my mind the whole catalogue of fashionable friendships and polite intimacies are not worth one honest tear of sympathy or one heartfelt emotion of true friendship. Unless I can enter the inner chambers of the soul and read the inscriptions there upon those ever-during tablets, and thus become acquainted with the inner life and know the inner man, I care not for intercourse, for nothing else is true friendship.... ”

“ And so the frank and loyal friendship went on its appointed course, as every frank and loyal friendship between two young and ardent souls who love each other has proceeded since the beginning of a sophisticated world. ”

“ On this refined affection, love, which is but a more interesting and tender kind of friendship, ought to be founded. The same virtues, the same dispositions and qualities which are necessary in a friend, are still more requisite in a companion for life. ”

“ To prove to you that friendship does exist, I offer you mine. You wish to know the world,—to study life. Come, and I will give you the clew. I will be your guide,—your adviser. We will devote ourselves to social anatomy, and dissect humanity. ”

“ And thinking in the present æra
That friendship is a pure chimæra:
More passionate no creature living,
Proud, obstinate, and unforgiving,
But yet for those who kindness show,
Ready through fire and smoke to go. ”

“ Our friendship, may it last forever. Forever and a day, may it grow in love, but never Make us feel different than today. Together we have gone through all these years, We have shared each other's happiness and tears. ”

“ We may come to look at some of the uses and the delights of friendship. "As in water face answers to face, so in the heart man answers to man." [477] In the heart of our friend we see our own character reflected just as gazing into a still pool we see the reflection of our own face. ”

“ Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. ”

“ Remember, then—should we never meet again—if in future periods you should find, that the friendship of the world is—"a shade that follows wealth and fame;"—if, where you have conferred obligations, you are repaid with ingratitude—where you have placed confidence, with treachery—and where you have a claim to zeal, with coldness! ”

“ "Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship Let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!" ”

“ A friendship that like love is warm,
A love like friendship steady. ”

“ Thus was my fair friend obliged at last either to accept the love of one to whom she felt unable to give her whole heart, or to lose the friendship, perhaps forever, of the man she esteemed most on earth—a common but not the less an unpleasant dilemma. ”

“ In fact, this friendship, though so true and tried, was conceived very suddenly."
"I have sufficient confidence in your powers of discernment and your nobility of heart to feel sure that you have chosen your friend wisely, my dear child." ”

“ Even supposing I loved you as I ought to the man whose heart I take into my keeping, there are obstacles-do not ask what-such being the case, is it not best to conquer all but friendship in the beginning? ”

“ But done it must be, if the friendship is to be worth the name. You must find out what is there, at the very root and bottom of one another’s hearts; and if you are at one there, nothing on earth can, or at least ought, to sunder you. ”

“ But whatever be the method by which a true friendship is formed, whether the growth of time or the birth of sudden sympathy, there seems, on looking back, to have been an element of necessity. It is a sort of predestined spiritual relationship. We speak of a man meeting his fate, and we speak truly. When we look back we see it to be like destiny; life converged to life, and there was no getting out of it even if we wished it. ”

“ You may best understand this friendship by considering that, whereas the merely natural ties uniting the human race are indefinite, this one is so concentrated, and confined to so narrow a sphere, that affection is ever shared by two persons only or at most by a few. ”

“ Let the cynic who spurns the consoling influences of friendship ponder upon the life-intimacy of these two old men who, throughout the cares and turmoils of a long and engrossing existence, illustrated so beautifully the charm of such a benign relationship. ”

“ "And what is friendship but a name,
A charm that lulls to sleep,
A shade that follows wealth or fame,
But leaves the wretch to weep? ”

“ The same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his maturity, we recognize in one of the Essays of the youth.
"All men of gifted intellect and fine genius," says Charles Emerson, "must entertain a noble idea of friendship. Our reverence we are constrained to yield where it is due,—to rank, merit, talents. But our affections we give not thus easily. ”

“ The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. ”

“ I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. ”

“ You are right in supposing, that I interest myself in everything that affects you and yours, sympathizing in your afflictions, and rejoicing in your felicities; for our friendship is ancient, and was never obscured by the least cloud. ”

“ Be civil and obliging to all, dutiful where God and nature command you; but friend to one, and that friendship keep sacred, as the greatest tie upon earth, and be sure to ground it upon virtue; for no other is either happy or lasting. ”

“ Regarding friendship, how often it is only theoretic; intimacy without intercourse; instead of active only passive sympathy, the philosophical equivalent of cement, such as isinglass or glue! When friends have a common interest, how they stick to each other! ”