Размышления великих людей о дружбе

Martial.

* * *

Choose for your friend him that is wise and good, and secret and just, ingenious and honest, and in those things, which have a latitude, use your own liberty.

Taylor.

* * *

Friendship is made up of esteem and pleasure; pity is composed of sorrow and contempt: the mind may for some time fluctuate between them, but it can never entertain both at once.

Goldsmith.

* * *

Friends are much better tried in bad fortune than in good fortune.

Aristotle.

* * *

Fellowship of souls does not consist in the proximity of persons. There are millions who live in close personal contact dwell under the same roof, board at the same table, and work in the same shop between whose minds there is scarcely a point of contact, whose souls are as far asunder as the poles; whilst, contrariwise, there are those separated by oceans and continents, ay, by the mysterious gulf that divides time from eternity, between whom there is a constant intercourse, a delightful fellowship. In truth, we have often more communion with the distant than the near.

Dr. Thomas.

* * *

Friendship must live by faith and not by sight.

Eliot.

* * *

Friends should not be chosen to flatter. The quality we should prize is that rectitude which will shrink from no truth. Intimacies, which increase vanity, destroy friendship.

Channing.

* * *

Favors, and especially pecuniary ones, are generally fatal to friendship; for our pride will ever prompt us to lower the value of the gift by diminishing that of the donor. Ingratitude is an effort to recover our own esteem by getting rid of our esteem for our benefactor, whom we look upon as a sort of tooth-drawer that has cured us of one pain by inflicting another.

Smith.

* * *

Friendship throws a greater lustre on prosperity, while it lightens adversity by sharing in its griefs and anxieties.

Cicero.

* * *

Friendship hath the skill and observation of the best physician; the diligence and vigilance of the best nurse; and the tenderness and patience of the best mother.

Lord Clarendon.

* * *

Friendship! The precious gold of life

By age refined, yet ever new;

Tried in the crucible of time

It always rings of service true.

Friendship! The beauteous soul of life

Which gladdens youth and strengthens age;

May it our hearts and lives entwine

Together on life's fleeting page.

Shaylor.

* * *

Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which strengthens with the setting sun of life.

La Fontaine.

* * *

Friendship, love, and piety, ought to be handled with a sort of mysterious secrecy; they ought to be spoken of only in the rare moments of perfect confidence.

Novalis.

* * *

Few men are calculated for that close connection which we distinguish by the name of friendship, and we well know the difference between a friend and an acquaintance.

Sterne.

* * *

Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is. God is love. And to make religion akin to friendship is simply to give it the highest expression conceivable by man.

Drummond.