Chapter 2

Devotion of Friendship

Friendship? two bodies and one soul.

Joseph Roux

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

George Eliot

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

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

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

Johnxv. 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

Gay

Robert Browning

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cowper

Shakespeare

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

Longfellow

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

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

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

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

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

In friendship your heart is like a bell struck every time your friend is in trouble.

Henry Ward Beecher

Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real sympathy.

Emerson

The vital air of friendship is composed of confidence.

Joseph Roux

Friendship closes its eyes rather than see the moon eclipst; while malice denies that it is ever at the full.

J. C. and A. W. Hare

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.

Henry D. Thoreau

It is a proof of a man's fitness for friendship that he is able to do without that which is cheap and passionate. A true friendship is as wise as it is tender.

Henry D. Thoreau

Young

The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.

Hazlitt

Saadi

Constancy of Friendship

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

Proverbsxvii. 17

Thomas Moore

A true friend is for ever a friend.

George MacDonald

Your friend has never really loved you, never quite trusted you, who lightly lets himself think that you have drifted away from him.

Bishop Thorold

There are three faithful friends—an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.

Benjamin Franklin

Burns

Roxburghe Ballads

Shakespeare

The faults of our friends ought never to anger us so far as to give an advantage to our enemies.

Lord Chesterfield

Tennyson

Thomas Moore

Longfellow

Lack of Friends

It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness.

Bacon

Saadi

Those that want friends are cannibals of their own hearts. Communicating a man's self to his friends redoubleth his joys and cutteth griefs in halves. A friend is anotherhimself. If a man have not a friend, he may quit the world's stage!

Bacon

A favourite has no friend.

Gray

It is only the great-hearted who can be true friends; the mean and cowardly can never know what true friendship means.

Charles Kingsley

We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us and which we can love.

Emerson

Loss of Friendship

Coleridge

Intimacies which increase vanity destroy friendship.

William Ellery Channing

Between friends, frequent reproofs make the friendship distant.

Confucius

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

Emerson

Coleridge

Loss of Friends

Whittier

Longfellow

Mary Clemmer

A man dies as he looses his friends.

Bacon

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower, that man who has lost his wife.... And that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing his friend, by what name do we call him?... Here every human language holds its peace in impotence.

Joseph Roux

The fallying out of faithful frends is the renuyng of love.

Richard Edwards

Thomas Moore

Hafiz

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: Very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

2Samueli. 25, 26

Mrs Browning

Tennyson

Shakespeare

That aching of the breast, the grandest pain that man endures, which no other can assuage.

Henry D. Thoreau

Immortality of Friendship

Emerson

Let us lay hold of Friendship. In the eternal life shall we not have friends for evermore?

Anna R. Brown

Gay

O. W. Holmes

True friendship between man and man is infinite and immortal.

Plato

Tennyson

Whittier

Mary Clemmer

Tennyson

Index of Authors

Addison,7Alcott, A. B.,43,44,57Anon,26,56,57,60,68Aristotle,39Arnot,25Bacon,42,44,46,47,51,58,61,76,77,83Baillie, Joanna,46Ballads, Roxburghe,74Beecher, H. W.,69Birrell, Augustine,30Black, Hugh,9,13,18,38,42,56Blair,31Brown, Anna R.,32,35,87Browning, Robert,9,11,27,55,57Browning, Mrs,85Bruyère, De la,14Burns,44,73Byron,28Canticles,26Carlyle,48Channing, W. E.,42,59,65,66,79Chesterfield, Lord,75Cicero,7,27,37,47Clemmer, M.,82,91Coleridge,35,78,80Colton,8,32Confucius,22,52,79Cowper,62Drummond, Henry,15Ebers,68Ecclesiasticus,36,67Edwards, R.,83Eliot, George,45,51,58Ellis, Mrs,66Emerson,7,8,14,15,17,19,20,22,23,24,28,33,39,42,53,69,78,79,87Euripides,34Felltham, Owen,69Fénelon,30Fielding,21Franklin, B.,73Gay,24,55,87Goldsmith,38,43Gray,77Hafiz,12,84Hare, J. C. and A. W.,70Hazlitt,66,71Holmes, O. W.,18,59,60,88Homer,41Jerrold, Douglas,13John, St,25,54Johnson, Samuel,13,50Jonson, Ben,30Keats,50Kingsley, C.,77Longfellow,15,29,33,36,54,61,64,76,82MacDonald, George,73Montaigne,37Moore, Thomas,31,72,75,84Ovid,68Patmore, Coventry,61Persian, From the,19Philips, Catherine,12,20Plato,40,88Plautus,69Plutarch,25,65Pope,53Proverb, German,35Proverb, Oriental,33Proverbs, The,11,26,43,72Quarles,49Robertson, F. W.,59Roux, Joseph,27,38,51,58,70,83Saadi,10,25,47,54,60,63,71,76Sales, Francis de,63Samuel (Book of),85Schiller,35Scuderi, Mlle. de,17Selden,52Seneca,31,65Shakespeare,23,30,36,52,53,62,74,86Smith, Horace,48Smith, Sydney,56Smith, William,41Taylor, Jeremy,8,24,32,39,40,50Tennyson,16,24,41,45,75,86,89,91Thackeray,9,46Theophrastus,40Thoreau, Henry D.,28,70,86Thorold, Bishop,34,73Throckmorton, Allan,10Voltaire,16Warwick,67Washington, George,37Whittier,81,90Wilson, Thomas,40Wycherley,63Young,21,71

HERE ENDS NUMBER TWELVE OF SESAME BOOKLETS


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