Part 58

Friendship

AUGUST 15

"Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make our own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude."

Amiel's Journal.

"Everything that is mine, even to my life, I may give to one I love, but the secret of my friend is not mine to give."

PHILIP SIDNEY.

"When true friends part they should lock up one another's secrets and change the keys."

FELTHAM.

Friendship

AUGUST 16

"So true it is that nature abhors isolation, and ever leans upon something as a stay and support; and this is found in its most pleasing form in our closest friend."

CICERO.

"And great and numerous as are the blessings of friendship, this certainly is the sovereign one, that it gives us bright hopes for the future and forbids weakness and despair. In the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor; though he be weak, his friend's strength is his; and in his friend's life he enjoys a second life after his own is finished."

CICERO.

"In distress a friend Comes like a calm to the toss'd mariner."

EURIPIDES.

Friendship

AUGUST 17

"A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in himself."

Amiel's Journal.

"There are some to whom we speak almost in a language of our own, with the confidence that all our broken hints are recognised with a thrill of kinship, and our half-uttered thoughts discerned and shared: some with whom we need not cramp our meaning into the dead form of an explicit accuracy, and with whom we can forecast that we shall walk together in undoubting sympathy even over tracks of taste and belief which we may never yet have touched."

Faculties and Difficulties for Belief and Disbelief, Bishop PAGET.

"Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud."

ADDISON.

Friendship

AUGUST 18

"And though Aristotle does well to warn us that absence dissolves friendship, it is happily none the less true that friend may powerfully influence friend though the two be by no means constant associates. Even far removal in place, or in occupation, or in fortunes, cannot arrest influence. For once any man has true friends, he never again frames his decisions, even those that are most secret, as if he were alone in the world. He frames them habitually in the imagined company of his friends. In their visionary presence he thinks and acts; and by them, as visionary tribunal, he feels himself, even in his unspoken intentions and inmost feelings, to be judged. In this aspect friendship may become a supreme force both to encourage and restrain. For it is not simply what our friends expect of us that is the vital matter here. They are often more tolerant of our failings than is perhaps good for us. It is what in our best moments we believe that they expect of us. For it is then that they become to us, not of their own choice but of ours, a kind of second conscience, in whose presence our weaknesses and backslidings become 'that worst kind of sacrilege that tears down the invisible altar of trust.'"

The Making of Character, Professor MACCUNN.