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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
Friendship
"There is no possession more valuable than a good and faithful friend."
-Socrates
"Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant."
-Socrates
"Friendship stimulates men to noble actions, for with friends men are more able both to think and to act."
-Aristotle
"Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner."
-Tao Te Ching
"A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignantion."
-Bertrand Russell
"Nothing is so dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is to be preferred."
-Jean De La Fontaine
"How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks."
-Marcus Aurelius Antonius
"Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?"
-D.H. Lawrence
"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods."
-Aristotle
"Champagne for my real friends,
real pain for my sham friends."
-Francis Bacon
"It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends."
-J.K. Rowling
"The richer your friends, the more they will cost you."
-Elisabeth Marbury (1856-1933)
"Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, "sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends." I know I am v. fortunate in that respect."
C.S. Lewis
The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves
"For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that hold human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe."
-H.L. Mencken
"he's the kind of man who picks his friends-to pieces."
-Mae West
"A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends."
-George Washington
"To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can have."
-Theodore H. White
"Love thy neighbor as thyself,
but choose your neighborhood."
-Louise Beal
"We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves; we encourage each other in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself."
-Lamb
"The ancient Greeks believed that only through constant dialogue and honest sharing can friends reach a higher level of truth together."
Joan Anderson
The Second Journey
"you must not break friendship on account of different religious opinions, for it is universally agreed that all religions are matters of imagination."
-Solomon Ibn Verga
"I remember I was insufferably sad; I wanted to cry...I was finally roused from this gloomy state one evening on reaching Switzerland, and I was roused by the bray of a donkey in the marketplace. I was immensely struck with this donkey, and for some reason extraordinarily pleased with it, and suddenly everything seemed to clear up in my head...I understood at once what a useful creature it was-industrious, strong, patient, cheap, long-suffering, And so, through the donkey....my melancholy passed completely."
-from Dostoevsky's The Idiot
"Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults."
-Socrates
"Friendship cannot live with Ceremony, nor without Civility."
-Ben Franklin
"The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are."
C.S. Lewis
"My father and he had one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether."
-Jorge Luis Borges
"my hates have always occupied my mind much more actively and have been greater spiritual satisfactions than my real friendships."
-Westbrook Pegler
"Make your friends your teachers and mingle the pleasures of conversation with the advantages of instruction."
-Baltasar Gracian
"Agreement makes us soft and complacent; disagreement brings out our strength. Our real enemies are the people who make us feel so good that we are slowly, but inexorably, pulled down into the quicksand of smugness and self-satisfaction."
-Sydney J. Harris
"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it."
W. Somerset Maugham
"We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies."
-Roderick Thorp
"There are deep sorrows and killing cares in life, but the encouragement and love of friends were given us to make all difficulties bearable."
John Oliver Hobbes
"A friend is, as it were, a second self."
-Cicero
"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."
-E.M. Forester
"We ought to look upon those men as our friends who are inclined to assist us, and to requite our kindnesses with kindness, even if they are destitute of power; for friendship is a thing which is seen more in moments of necessity, than in a steady conjunction or union of dispositions. So that in the case of each person who unites with another in an association of friendship, one may apply the expression of Pythagoras to him, and say, " A friend is a second I."
Philo of Alexandria
"The friendships of the wicked are mischievous, and very often the soul of such men, being influenced by such associations, takes the impressions of downright insanity. It is not the country which makes men bad, or the city which makes them good, but the habits of living with such and such men."
Philo of Alexandria
"There is nothing like sexual frustration to give warmth to friendship, which flourishes in prisons, armies, on Arctic expeditions and did well in wartime Oxford."
-John Mortimer
"One doesn’t know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one’s friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one."
D.H. Lawrence
"Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality."
-W.H. Auden
"Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy."
-William Hazlitt
"Interesting people are not necessarily nice to know."
-Patricia Fara
Fatal Attraction
"Be sincere. Be simple in words, manners and gestures. Amuse as well as instruct. If you can make a man laugh, you can make him think and make him like and believe you."
-Alfred Emanuel Smith
"My True friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved."
-Collette
"Keep your friendships in repair."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Before we can make friends with anyone else, we must first make friends with ourselves."
Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is easier to forgive an enemy than it is a friend."
William Blake
"Be reasonable: No one can be perfect; he can only aim at being a likeable, reasonable being."
-Lin Yutang
"It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business."
-Mohandas K. Gandhi
"It is good to have friends, even in hell."
-Spanish proverb
"Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend’s emancipator."
Nietzsche
"The friend who understands you, creates you."
Romain Rolland
"We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him."
-Moonesquieu
"There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe."
-Teilhard de Chardin
"The better part of one's life consists of his friendships."
-Abraham Lincoln
"Be slow to fall into friendship, but when thou art in ..continue firm and constant."
-Socrates
"True friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation."
-George Washington
"There are deep sorrows and killing cares in life, but the encouragement and love of friends were given us to make all difficulties bearable."
John Oliver Hobbes
""Thou mayest be sure that he that will in private tell thee of thy faults, is they friend, for he adventures they dislike, and doth hazard hatred: there are few people that can endure it, every man for the most part delighting in Self-Praise, which is one of the most universal Follies that bewitcheth mankind."
Sir Walter Raleigh
"We take care of our health, we lay up money , we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient, but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all-friends?"
Emerson
"The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when they discover that someone else believes in them and is willing to trust them."
-Emerson
"It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults-So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship."
H.W. Beecher
"A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the last care to acquire."
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld
"I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing."
-Katherine Mansfield
"If the body is in pain, one of the first things to look for is infection; if the soul is in pain, we might look for lack of friendship.
Friendship creates the cosmologies in which we live, and if we do not have a cultivated world made through the conversations and exchanges of friendship, we will necessarily feel detached, unmoored and unplaced. Like so many things of the soul, we may believe that friendship is tangential to life, an added boon, or an accessory. But if we were to take Epicurus, Ficino, Thomas More, Emily Dickinson, and many other writers at their word, we would realize that friendship is a necessity."
Thomas Moore, Soul Mates
"It is the depth and vibrancy of friendship that brings beauty to your life. Friendship is the ground you plant your tree in, the fertile basis of your flourishing. Friendship creates a continuous vitality around you, and in you. The friend may be a bird, or a cat, or a frail person who is dying. Still, if the friendship is strong, it will purify the circle of your living as a drop of the prophet's blood does the ground it falls on.
True friends sacrifice wealth and reputation, everything for each other. When asked why, they say I wish I had more to give. Abu Bakr and the other companions of Muhammad lived in such a friendship."
-Bahauddin (The Father Of Rumi
The Drowned Book
Coleman Barks & John Moyne
"Most people enjoy the inferiority of their best friends."
Chesterfield
"Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends."
-Mary Catherwood
"A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring."
-La Rochefoucauld
"Everybody’s friend is nobody’s
Schopenhaurer
"Who boasts to have won a multitude of friends has ne’er had one"
Coleridge
"There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first....when you learn to live for others, they will live for you."
-Paramahansa Yogananda
"The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them."
Moliere
"Friendship is like money, easier made than kept."
Samuel Butler
"I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing."
-Katherine Mansfield
"Few friendships would endure if each party knew what his friend said about him in his absence, even when speaking sincerely and dispassionately."
Pascal
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
Longfellow
"Everyman passes his life in search after friendship."
Emerson
"What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?"
-Anais Nin
"....One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are...."
-Gail Godwin
"One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives."
Euripides (427-408 B.C.)
"Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce."
Voltaire
Friendship Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
"There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time."
-Rebecca West
"I had found a kind of serenity, a new maturity.....I didn't feel better or stronger than anyone else, but it seemed no longer important whether everyone loved me or not-more important now was for me to love them."
-Beverly Sills
"Friendships are different from all other relationships. Unlike acquaintanceship, friendship is based on love. Unlike lovers and married couples, it is free of jealousy. Unlike children and parents, it knows neither criticism nor resentment. Friendship has no status in law. Business partnerships are based on a contract. So is marriage. Parents are bound by the law. But friendships are freely entered into, freely given, freely exercised."
Stephen Ambrose
Comrades
"Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies, they are ready enough to tell him."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
"The glory of friendship is not in the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is in the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them."
Goethe
"We challenge one another to be funnier and smarter....It's the way friends make love to one another."
-Annie Gottlieb
"Make no man your friend before inquiring how he has used his former friends; for you must expect him to treat you as he has treated them. Be slow to give your friendship, but when you have given it, strive to make it lasting; for it is as reprehensible to make many changes in one's associates as to have no friends at all. Neither test your friends to your own injury nor be willing to forego a test of your companions."
-Isocrates
"have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? have you not learned great lessons from those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you, or disputed the passage with you.?
-Walt Whitman
"One of two things will happen when you socialize with others. You either become like your companions, or you bring them over to your own ways. Just as when a dead coal contacts a live one, either the first will extinguish the last, or the last kindle the first. Great is the danger; so be circumspect on entering into personal associations, even and especially light-hearted ones.
Most of us do not possess sufficiently developed steadfastness to steer our companions to our own purpose, so we end up being carried along by the crowd. Our own values and ideals become fuzzy and tainted; our resolve is destabilized.
It's hard to resist when friends or associates start speaking brashly. Caught off guard when our associates broach ignoble subjects, we are swept along by the social momentum. It is the nature of conversation that its multiple meanings, innuendoes, and personal motivations move along at such a fast clip they can instantly shift in unwholesome directions, sullying everyone involved. So until wise sentiments are fixed into you as if they were instinct and you have thus acquired some power of self-defense, choose your associations with care and monitor the thrust of the conversations in which you find yourself."
-Epictetus A.D. 77
"In Megalopolis the sentiment of friendship wastes away. Friends become, in the vulgarism of modern speech, "pals", who may be defined as person whom your work compels you to associate with or, on a still more debased level, persons who will allow you to use them to your advantage. The meeting of minds, the sympathy between personalities which all cultured communities have regarded as part of the good life, demand too much sentiment for a world of machines and a false egalitarianism, and one detects even a faint suspicion that friendship, because it rests upon selection, is undemocratic. It is this type of mentality which will study with perfect naiveté a work on how to win friends and influence people. To one brought up in a society spiritually fused-what I shall call the metaphysical community-the idea of a campaign to win friend's must be incomprehensible. Friends are attracted by one's personality, if it is of the right sort, and any conscious attempt is inseparable from guile. And the art of manipulating personalities obviously presumes a disrespect for personality. Only in splintered community, where the spirit is starved to the point of atrophy, could such an imposture flourish."
Richard M. Weaver
Ideas have Consequences
"Don Vito Corleone was a man to whom everybody came for help, and never were they disappointed. He made no empty promises, nor the craven excuse that his hands were tied by more powerful forces in the world than himself. It was not necessary that he be your friend, it was not even important that you had no means with which to repay him. Only one thing was required. That you, you yourself, proclaim your friendship. And then, no mater how poor or power-less the supplicant, Don Corleone would take that man's troubles to his heart. And he would let nothing stand in the way to a solution of that man's woe. His reward? Friendship, the respectful title of 'Don' and sometimes the more affectionate salutation of 'Godfather.'
Mario Puzo
The Godfather
"All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity and attempt at half ness, or good for me that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him...."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Compensation"
"Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy or intimacy to come. But when and when? Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Probably the most successful experiment in mixed friendship, which yielded the most interesting practical results, was that of the Society of Friends (alias the Quakers). It was based on the principle that individuals must make up their own minds about how they lived: it had no doctrine, no book of rules, no priests, and in its marriage ceremony there was no promise of obedience. Run on democratic lines, its members said what they thought at meetings in which no decision was taken until everyone was agreed. They ignored rank and status, calling everyone Thou. Their way of dealing with their persecutors was to meet them personally and talk with them face to face, which surprisingly did sometimes work even with fierce opponents and even though they were challenging the very foundations of society. The explanation of their success was a friendship between their founder, George Fox (1624-91), a shoemaker's apprentice, and Margaret Fell, the wife of a judge. Equality between the sexes was a basic belief, reinforced by equal education, so that the society produced some very remarkable women. One of them, Mary Fisher, traveled 1,500 miles on foot to urge the Sultan of Turkey to change his ways, and he received her: when she asked him whether he understood her message, he replied, 'Every word, and it was the truth.' But of course nothing changed in the Ottoman Empire.
Theodore Zeldin
An Intimate History of Humanity
"Just because some people are nice to you doesn't mean you should spend time with them. Just because they seek you out and are interested in you or your affairs doesn't mean you should associate with them. Be selective about whom you take on as friends, colleagues, and neighbors. All of these people can affect your destiny. The world is full of agreeable and talented folk. They key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best. But remember that our moral influence is a two-way street, and we should thus make sure by our own thoughts, words, and deeds to be a positive influence on those we deal with. The real test of personal excellence lies in the attention we give to the often neglected small details of our conduct.
Regularly ask yourself, "How are my thoughts, words and, and deeds affecting my friends, my spouse, my neighbor, my child, my employer, my subordinates, and my fellow citizens? Am I doing my part to contribute to the spiritual progress of all with whom I come in contact?" Make it your business to draw out the best in others by being an exemplar yourself."
-Epictetus A.D. 75
"In order to have an enemy, one must be somebody. One must be a force before he can be resisted by another force. A malicious enemy is better than a clumsy friend."
-Madame Swetchine
"We cannot learn real patience and tolerance from a guru or a friend. They can be practiced only when we come in contact with someone who creates unpleasant experiences. According to Shantideva, enemies are really good for us as we can learn a lot from them and build our inner strength."
-Dalai Lama
"Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Many things that we pursue as ends in themselves are also means to other goals. Consider friendship: The person with friends has help in his time of need, consolation in despair and fellowship in rejoicing. In everything he attempts, he is better off than the friendless person, and all his burdens are more lightly borne. But this does not mean that he values his friend merely as a means to achieving his own selfish goals. On the contrary, he values his friend for the particular person he is, and without thought for the benefit. The benefit is real, but it arises "by an invisible hand," from actions with another intention.
Moreover, the person who treats another as a means to his own goals, however gently, with whatever compunction, is not treating the other as a friend. And if you do not treat someone as a friend, he ceases to be one. From this we can derive a striking conclusion: Friends are useful, so long as you do not make use of them! Treat him as useful, however, and he will soon cease to be so. "
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch
Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtuous Business
"between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
-Oscar Wilde
"No person has ever walked our earth and been free from the pains of loneliness. Rich and poor, wise and ignorant, faith-filled and agnostic, healthy and unhealthy, have all alike had to face and struggle with its potentially paralyzing grip. it has granted no immunities. To be human is to be lonely....Even if you are a relatively happy person, a person who relates easily to others and has many close friends, you are probably still lonely at times. If you are a very sensitive person, the type who feels things deeply, you are probably, to some degree, lonely all the time."
-Ronald Rolheiser: The Restless heart
"The facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order. In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one's own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand. A hedge-fund manager might make money by using the computational power of the cloud to crate fantastical financial instruments that make bets on derivatives in such a way as to invent the phony virtual collateral for stupendous risks. This is a subtle form of counterfeiting, and it is precisely the same maneuver a socially competitive teenager makes in accumulating fantastical number of "friends" through a service like Facebook. But let's suppose you disagree that the idea of friendship is being reduced. Even then one must remember that the customers of social networks are not the members of those networks. The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear in any significant way. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypothetical advertisers-we might call them messianic advertisers-who could someday show up."
-Jaron Lanier
You Are Not a Gadget
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Read: "Will Power…Using Shakespeare’s Insights to Transform your Life" By Dr. George Weinberg & Dianne Rowe
Book: "On Apology" by Aaron Lazare, M.D.
Book: "The Art of Living" by Epictetus
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