Part 8

If my brother, or kinsman, will be my friend, I ought to prefer him before a stranger; or I show little duty or nature to my parents.

And as we ought to prefer our kindred in point of affection, so, too, in point of charity, if equally needing and deserving.

--Penn.

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It is equally impossible to forget our friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends that we may go out and meet their ideal cousins!

--Thoreau.

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I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine--wild, delicate, throbbing property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.

--Emerson.

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In very many cases of friendship, or what passes for it, the old axiom is reversed, and like clings to unlike more than to like.

--Dickens.

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Hearts are linked to hearts by God. The friend on whose fidelity you can count, whose success in life flushes your cheek with honest satisfaction, whose triumphant career you have traced and read with a heart throbbing almost as if it were a thing alive, for whose honor you would answer as for your own; that friend, given to you by circumstances over which you have no control, was God's own gift.

--Robertson.

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If thou neglect thy love to thy neighbor, in vain thou professest thy love to God.

--Quarles.

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I cannot contentedly frame a prayer for myself in particular, without a catalogue for my friends; nor request a happiness, wherein my sociable disposition doth not desire the fellowship of my neighbor.

--Browne.

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It's an owercome sooth for age an' youth And it brooks wi' nae denial, That the dearest friends are the auldest friends And the young are just on trial.

There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld And it's him that has bereft me; For the surest friends are the auldest friends And the maist o' mine hae left me.

There are kind hearts still, for friends to fill And fools to take and break them; But the nearest friends are the auldest friends And the grave's the place to seek them.

--Stevenson.

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God divided man into men that they might help each other.