Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.
Friendship, on the other hand, serves a great host of different purposes all at the same time. In whatever direction you turn, it still remains yours. No barrier can shut it out. It can never be untimely; it can never be in the way. We need friendship all the time, just as much as we need the proverbial prime necessities of life, fire and water.
I have always laid it down as a maxim -and found it justified by experience -that a man and a woman make far better friendships than can exist between two of the same sex -but then with the condition that they never have made or are to make love to each other.
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Stay, my lord, And let your reason with your choler question What 'tis you go about: to climb steep hills Requires slow pace at first: anger is like A full-hot horse, who being allow'd his way, Self-mettle tires him. Not a man in England Can advise me like you: be to yourself As you would to your friend.
Friendship exists outside our modern economy of scarcity... It's not about apportioning vanishing resources of time and energy. Friendship is a blessed relic of the ancient economy of the gift, and the time freely given to people dear to you actually creates magical abundance.
My only sketch, profile, of Heaven is a large blue sky, and larger than the biggest I have seen in June - and in it are my friends - every one of them.
To give and receive advice - the former with freedom, and yet without bitterness, the latter with patience and without irritation - is peculiarly appropriate to geniune friendship.
Nature's law, That man was made to mourn. Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn! O Death, the poor man's dearest friend, The kindest and the best!
Statesman, yet friend to truth! of soul sincere, In action faithful, and in honour clear; Who broke no promise, serv'd no private end, Who gain'd no title, and who lost no friend.
Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead.