The Golden Link of Friendship

Title: The Golden Link of Friendship

Author: Various

Release date: November 11, 2011 [eBook #37982]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37982

Credits: Produced by Chris Curnow, David E. Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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SESAME BOOKLETS

The Golden Link of Friendship

George G. Harrap & Co. 3 Portsmouth St. London

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The Riverside Press Ltd., Edinburgh

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Foreword

FRIENDSHIP is one of the most important things in the world. As a factor in educating the mind, forming the character, guiding the will, and shaping the destiny, the influence of Friendship can scarcely be overrated. Friendship has made a man a hero, a saint, a demon!

It is to be hoped, therefore, that these Golden Thoughts on Friendship—garnered from a wide field—will prove helpful and inspiring [Pg 6]and tend to create pure and noble ideals in the minds of readers.

The touching story of David and Jonathan continues to possess a surpassing charm for humanity; and the voyager over Life's ocean who discovers a true friend discovers an island offering a safe, quiet haven from every storm that blows, and which presents innumerable luscious fruits and sweet-scented flowers for his refreshment and enjoyment.

A. E. S.

[Pg 7]

Birth of Friendship

Nature loves nothing solitary, and always reaches out to something as a support, which ever in the sweetest friend is most delightful.

Cicero

Addison

The only way to have a friend, is to be one.

Emerson

[Pg 8]

Some friendships are made by nature, some by contract, some by interest, and some by souls.

Jeremy Taylor

The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.

Colton

Only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.

Emerson

[Pg 9]

Culture of Friendship

It is a friendly heart that has plenty of friends.

Thackeray

We have few friendships, because we are not willing to pay the price of friendship.

Hugh Black

Robert Browning

[Pg 10]

A friend whom you have been gaining during your whole life, you ought not to be displeased with in a moment. A stone is many years becoming a ruby; take care that you do not destroy it in an instant against another stone.

Saadi

Once let friendship be given that is born of God, nor time nor circumstance can change it to a lessening; it must be mutual growth, increasing trust, widening faith, enduring patience, forgiving love, unselfish ambition—an affection built before the Throne, that will bear the test of time and trial.

Allan Throckmorton

[Pg 11]

A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.

Proverbs xviii. 24

Robert Browning

[Pg 12]

Hafiz

Sacredness of Friendship

Catherine Philips

[Pg 13]

Golden friendship is not a common thing to be picked up in the street.... There are pearls of the heart, which cannot be thrown to swine.

Hugh Black

Samuel Johnson

O Friendship! thou divinest alchemist, that man should ever profane thee!

Douglas Jerrold

[Pg 14]

Pure friendship is something which men of inferior intellect can never taste.

De la Bruyère

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both.

Emerson

For perfect friendship it may be said to require natures so rare and costly, so well tempered each, and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced that very seldom can its satisfaction be realised.

Emerson

[Pg 15]

Love shows me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every other direction.

Emerson

Who talks of a common friendship? There is no such thing in the world. On earth no word is more sublime. Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is. God is love.

Henry Drummond

Longfellow

[Pg 16]

Tennyson

Friendship is the marriage of the soul.

Voltaire

[Pg 17]

Beauty of Friendship

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Emerson

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed: there is no winter, and no night: all tragedies, all ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the preceding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons.

Emerson

The only rose without thorns is friendship.

Mlle. de Scuderi

[Pg 18]

To the young friendship comes as the glory of spring, a very miracle of beauty, a mystery of birth: to the old it has the bloom of autumn, beautiful still, but with the beauty of decay.

Hugh Black

O. W. Holmes

[Pg 19]

Emerson

From the Persian

[Pg 20]

Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day.

Emerson

Catherine Philips

[Pg 21]

Choice of Friendship

Young

The highest friendship must always lead us to the highest pleasure.

Fielding

[Pg 22]

Friendship demands a religious treatment. We must not be wilful, we must not provide. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it.

Emerson

Friendship with the upright; friendship with the sincere; and friendship with the man of much observation: these are advantageous. Friendship with the man of specious airs; friendship with the insinuatingly soft; and friendship with the glib-tongued: these are injurious.

Confucius

[Pg 23]

Oh, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!

Emerson

My friends have come to me unsought; the great God gave them to me.

Emerson

Shakespeare

[Pg 24]

He makes no friend who never made a foe.

Tennyson

Gay

A man's friends are his magnetisms.

Emerson

A good man is the best friend, and therefore soonest to be chosen, longer to be retained, and, indeed, never to be parted with, unless he cease to be that for which he was chosen.

Jeremy Taylor

[Pg 25]

Friendship sealed by companionship in sin will not last long.

Arnot

Saadi

Friendship requires a steady, constant, and unchangeable character, a person that is uniform in his intimacy.

Plutarch

Divine Friendship

Ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.

John xv. 14

[Pg 26]

His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.

Canticles v. 16

He that loveth pureness of heart, for the grace of his lips the King shall be his friend.

Proverbs xxii. 11

It is said that when he came to die, the last words of the American President Edwards, after bidding his weeping relatives good-bye, were: "Now where is Jesus of Nazareth, my true and never-failing Friend?" So saying he fell asleep.

Anon

[Pg 27]

Reality of Friendship

Friendship is the ideal, friends are the reality; reality always remains far apart from the ideal.

Joseph Roux

They seem to take away the sun from the world who withdraw friendship from life.

Cicero

Robert Browning

[Pg 28]

Friendship is Love without his wings!

Byron

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.

Emerson

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

Henry D. Thoreau

[Pg 29]

Longfellow

[Pg 30]

Friendship is a word the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm.

Augustine Birrell

Real friends are our greatest joy and our greatest sorrow.

Fénelon

Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.

Shakespeare

Worth of Friendship

True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.

Ben Jonson

[Pg 31]

Blair

Thomas Moore

Friendship always benefits, while love sometimes injures.

Seneca

[Pg 32]

To have a friend is to have one of the sweetest gifts that life can bring: to be a friend is to have a solemn and tender education of soul from day to day.

Anna R. Brown

Friendship is an allay of our sorrows, the ease of our passions, the discharge of our oppressions, the sanctuary to our calamities, the counsellor of our doubts, the clarity of our minds, the emission of our thoughts, the exercise and improvement of what we meditate.

Jeremy Taylor

True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.

Colton

[Pg 33]

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

Emerson

Ah, how good it feels! the hand of an old friend.

Longfellow

Oriental Proverb

Emerson

[Pg 34]

A friend who will not despise us for our weakness, nor disown us for our sinfulness, nor tire of us for being troublesome, nor scoff at us for our sensibility, but who will patiently hear our tale, fully understand our regret, tenderly recognise our stumbling-blocks, and be honest enough to tell us the truth, cost us what it may—oh, do you not see what a real help he might be to us.

Bishop Thorold

Euripides

[Pg 35]

I used to think that friendship meant happiness: I have learnt that it means discipline.

Anna R. Brown

Schiller

We can live without a brother, but not without a friend.

German Proverb

Coleridge

[Pg 36]

You shall perceive how you mistake my fortunes; I am wealthy in my friends.

Shakespeare

A faithful friend is the medicine of life.

Ecclesiasticus

Longfellow

[Pg 37]

Disinterestedness of Friendship

In friendship, there is no commerce or business depending on the same, but itself.

Montaigne

You must therefore love me, myself, and not my circumstances, if we are to be real friends.

Cicero

I can never think of promoting my convenience at the expense of a friend's interest and inclination.

George Washington

[Pg 38]

There is possible to-day, as ever, a generous friendship which forgets self.... The miracle of friendship has been too often enacted on this dull earth of ours to suffer us to doubt either its possibility or its wondrous beauty.

Hugh Black

Friendship is like a debt of honour; the moment it is talked of, it loses its real name and assumes the more ungrateful form of obligation.

Goldsmith

Have friends, not for the sake of receiving, but of giving.

Joseph Roux

[Pg 39]

Amongst true friends there is no fear of losing anything.

Jeremy Taylor

When men are friends, there is no need of justice; but when they are just, they still need friendship.

Aristotle

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. To be capable of that high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two before there can be very one.

Emerson

[Pg 40]

No friendship can excuse a sin.

Jeremy Taylor

Friendship is to be purchased only by friendship. A man must have authority over others, but he can never have their heart but by giving his own.

Thomas Wilson

True friends visit us in prosperity only when invited, but in adversity they come without invitation.

Theophrastus

Now can there be a worse disgrace than this—that I should be thought to value money more than the life of a friend?

Plato

[Pg 41]

Tennyson

Homer

Service of Friendship

The services which cement friendship are reciprocal services.

William Smith

[Pg 42]

Friends are to incite one another to God's works.

William Ellery Channing

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them.

Emerson

A principal fruit of friendship is the use and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.

Bacon

Most of our friendships lack the distinction of greatness, because we are not ready for little acts of service.

Hugh Black

[Pg 43]

Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly.

A. Bronson Alcott

Proverbs xxvii. 6, 9, 17

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals.

Goldsmith

[Pg 44]

To take the advice of some few friends is ever honourable; for lookers-on many times see more than gamesters, and the vale best discovereth the hill.

Bacon

Burns

Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs.

A. Bronson Alcott

[Pg 45]

Where you have friends you should not go to inns.

George Eliot

Tennyson

[Pg 46]

If I mayn't tell you what I feel, what is the use of a friend?

Thackeray

Joanna Baillie

Friendship maketh a fair day in the affections, from storm and tempest; but it maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness and confusion of thoughts.

Bacon

[Pg 47]

Saadi

There is no such flatterer as is a man's self, and there is no such remedy against flattery of a man's self as the liberty of a friend.

Bacon

Let flattery, however, the bond-maid of vices, be far removed from friendship, since it is not only unworthy of a friend, but of a free man.

Cicero

[Pg 48]

How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the Good and True: otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.

Carlyle

A real friend is one who will tell you of your faults and follies in prosperity, and assist you with his hand and heart in adversity.

Horace Smith

[Pg 49]

There be three sorts of friends: the first is like a torch we meet in a dark street; the second is like a candle in a lanthorn that we overtake; the third is like a link that offers itself to the stumbling passenger. The met torch is the sweet-lipped friend, which lends us a flash of compliment for the time, but quickly leaves us to our former darkness. The over-taken lanthorn is the true friend, which, though it promise but a faint light, yet it goes along with us as far as it can to our journey's end. The offered link is the mercenary friend, which though it be ready enough to do us service, yet that service hath a servile relation to our bounty.

Quarles

[Pg 50]

That which is most beneficent is also most excellent; and therefore those friendships must needs be most perfect where the friends can be most useful.

Jeremy Taylor

I would not live without the love of my friends.

Keats

Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friendship will discover and remedy, and which would remain forever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attractive to every misery.

Samuel Johnson

[Pg 51]

There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friend, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend, but he grieveth the less.

Bacon

Devotion of Friendship

Friendship? two bodies and one soul.

Joseph Roux

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibres that knit us to the old.

George Eliot

[Pg 52]

Shakespeare

Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles; have no friends not equal to yourself.

Confucius

Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes. They were easiest for his feet.

John Selden

[Pg 53]

Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.

Emerson

Pope

Keep thy friend under thy own life's key.

Shakespeare

[Pg 54]

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

John xv. 13

The friendship of the pure-minded, whether in presence or absence, is not such that they will find fault with thee behind thy back, and die for thee in thy presence.

Saadi

Longfellow

[Pg 55]

Gay

Robert Browning

[Pg 56]

When two friends part, they should lock up each other's secrets and exchange keys.

Anon

Joy of Friendship

Sydney Smith

The joy that comes from a true communion of heart with another is perhaps one of the purest and greatest in the world.

Hugh Black

[Pg 57]

Robert Browning

Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.

A. Bronson Alcott

Who is not ready to acknowledge that friendship is the delight of youth, the pillar of age, the bloom of prosperity, the charm of solitude, the solace of adversity, the best benefactor and comforter in this vale of tears?

Anon

[Pg 58]

Reasonableness of Friendship

However well proved a friendship may appear, there are confidences which it should not hear, and sacrifices which should not be required of it.

Joseph Roux

Costly followers are not to be liked; lest while a man maketh his train longer, he maketh his wings shorter.

Bacon

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

George Eliot

[Pg 59]

Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A true friend will appear such in leaving us to act according to our intimate conviction,—will cherish this nobleness of sentiment, will never wish to substitute his power for our own.

William Ellery Channing

The man who prefers his dearest friend to the call of duty will soon show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend.

F. W. Robertson

[Pg 60]

If you could keep your friend, approach him with a telescope, never with the microscope.

Anon

Give not thy friend so much power that if one day he should become a foe, thou mayst not be able to resist him.

Saadi

Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorises you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

[Pg 61]

Keep your undrest, familiar style for strangers, but respect your friend.

Coventry Patmore

Profession of Friendship

Longfellow

It is good discretion not to make too much of any man at first, because one cannot hold out that proportion.

Bacon

[Pg 62]

Cowper

Shakespeare

[Pg 63]

When an enemy has tried every expedient in vain, he will pretend friendship, and then, by this pretext, execute designs which no enemy could have effected.

Saadi

Worldly friendship is profuse in honeyed words, passionate endearments, commendations of beauty, while true friendship speaks a simple honest language.

Francis de Sales

Ceremony and great professing renders friendship as much suspected as it does religion.

Wycherley

[Pg 64]

Longfellow

[Pg 65]

Test of Friendship

A friend should be like money—tried before being required, not found faulty in our need.

Plutarch

He is our friend who loves more than admires us, and would aid us in our great work.

William Ellery Channing

Know this, that he that is a friend to himself, is a friend to all men.

Seneca

[Pg 66]

A friend is he who sets his heart upon us, is happy with us, and delights in us; does for us what we want, is willing and fully engaged to do all he can for us, on whom we can rely in all cases.

William Ellery Channing

To act the part of a true friend requires more conscientious feeling than to fill with credit and complacency any other station or capacity in social life.

Mrs Ellis

There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself; we cannot force it any more than love.

Hazlitt

[Pg 67]

If thou wouldst get a friend, prove him first, and be not hasty to credit him. For some man is a friend for his own occasion, and will not abide in the day of trouble.

Ecclesiasticus

When I see leaves drop from their trees in the beginning of autumn, just such, think I, is the friendship of the world. Whilst the sap of maintenance lasts, my friends swarm in abundance; but in the winter of my need they leave me naked. He is a happy man that hath a true friend at his need; but he is more truly happy that hath no need of his friend.

Warwick

[Pg 68]

As the yellow gold is tried in the fire, so the faith of friendship must be seen in adversity.

Ovid

True friendship, like a star, is made brilliant by the dark night.

Anon

Proof of Friendship

That friendship only is genuine when two friends, without speaking a word to each other, can, nevertheless, find happiness in being together.

George Ebers

[Pg 69]

Promises may get friends, but it is performance that must nurse and keep them.

Owen Felltham

He is a friend who, in dubious circumstances, aids in deeds when deeds are necessary.

Plautus