Thoughts On Friendship
Love and Live
To love abundantly is to live abundantly,
and to love for ever is to live for ever.
Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with love.
We want to live for ever
for the same reason
we want to live tomorrow.
Why do you want to live tomorrow?
It is because there is someone who loves you,
and whom you want to see tomorrow,
and be with,
and love back.
There is no other reason
why we should live on
than we love and are beloved.
It is when a man has no one to love him
that he commits suicide.
So long as he has friends,
those who love him
and whom he loves,
he will live;
because to live is to love.
- Henry Drummond (1851-1897)
The Qualities Of A Friend
There can be no friendship where there is no freedom.
Friendship loves a free air, and will not be penned up in straight and narrow enclosures.
It will speak freely, and act so too; and take nothing ill where no ill is meant;
nay, where it is, 'twill easily forgive, and forget too, upon small acknowledgements.
Friends are true twins in soul; they sympathise in everything.
One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone.
And if they could change bodies, they take their turns in pain as well as in pleasure;
relieving one another in their most adverse conditions.
What one enjoys, the other cannot want.
Like the primitive Christians, they have all things in common,
and no property but in one another.
A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly,
takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.
These being the qualities of a friend, we are to find them before we choose one.
The covetous, the angry, the proud, the jealous, the talkative, cannot but make ill friends,
as well as the false.
In short, choose a friend as thou dost a wife, till death separate you.
- William Penn (1644-1718)
Friends - False And True
If thou wouldest get a friend,
prove him first,
and be not hasty to credit him.
For some man is a friend
for his own occasion,
and will not abide
in the day of thy trouble.
And there is a friend,
who being turned to enmity and strife,
will discover thy reproach.
Again, some friend is a companion at the table,
and will not continue in the day of thy affliction.
But in thy prosperity
he will be as thyself,
and will be bold over thy servants.
If thou be brought low,
he will be against thee,
and will hide himself from thy face.
Separate thyself from thine enemies
and take heed of thy friends.
A faithful friend is a strong defence;
and he that hath found such an one
hath found a treasure.
Nothing doth countervail a faithful friend,
and his excellency is invaluable.
A faithful friend is the medicine of life;
and they that fear the Lord shall find him.
Whoso feareth the Lord shall direct his friendship aright:
for as he is,
so shall his neighbor be also.
- Ecclesiasticus (Book of Sirach)
We are all molded
and remolded
by those who have loved us,
and though that love
may pass we remain,
none the less,
their work...
No love,
no friendship
can ever cross
the path of our destiny
without leaving some mark
upon it forever.
- Francois Mauriac (1885-1970)