Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.
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.
. . . For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.
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.
When I was young I thought of friendship as a matter of total loyalty and unchanging preference and I was often disappointed. But as an adult I had come to see that it was more the refraction of some total faithfulness and joy of which we all had some primordial notion. The exchange of trust and the experience of understanding between two people was like a sign or witness to the possibilitity of eternal caring and understanding and communication.
Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.