Character and Conduct Part 37

AUGUST 14

"There are two elements that go to the composition of friends.h.i.+p, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth ... the other is Tenderness."

EMERSON.

"The essence of friends.h.i.+p is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.... A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud."

EMERSON.

"People do not sufficiently remember that in every relation of life, as in the closest one of all, they ought to take one another 'for better for worse.' That, granting the tie of friends.h.i.+p, grat.i.tude, esteem, be strong enough to have existed at all, it ought, either actively or pa.s.sively, to exist for ever. And seeing we can at best know our neighbour, companion, or friend as little, as alas! we often find he knoweth of us, it behoveth us to trust him with the most patient fidelity, the tenderest forbearance; granting unto all his words and actions that we do not understand, the utmost limit of faith that common sense and Christian justice will allow. Nay, these failing, is there not left Christian charity? which being past believing and hoping, still endureth all things."

Friends.h.i.+p

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.

Friends.h.i.+p

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 friends.h.i.+p, 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.

Friends.h.i.+p

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 kins.h.i.+p, 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.

Friends.h.i.+p

AUGUST 18

"And though Aristotle does well to warn us that absence dissolves friends.h.i.+p, it is happily none the less true that friend may powerfully influence friend though the two be by no means constant a.s.sociates. 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 friends.h.i.+p 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.

Friends.h.i.+p

AUGUST 19

"Few things are more fatal to friends.h.i.+p than the stiffness which cannot take a step towards acknowledgment."

_Life of F. W. Crossley_, RENDEL HARRIS.

"Do not discharge in haste the arrow which can never return: it is easy to destroy happiness; most difficult to restore it."

HERDER.

"Discord harder is to end than to begin."

SPENSER.

"Think of this doctrine--that reasoning beings were created for one another's sake; that to be patient is a branch of justice, and that men sin without intending it."

MARCUS AURELIUS.