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A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep.
I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues.
I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.
7. Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love.
The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase.
8. Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life. They are not to be indulged.
Almost all people descend to meet.
9. I ought to be equal to every relation.
I should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum.
10. Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked.
11. The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted,
12. I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage.
Happy is the house that shelters a friend!
There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship,
One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
13. The other element of friendship is tenderness.
I much prefer the company of plow-boys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed amity which only celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and dinners at the best taverns.
14. Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well-tempered, and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured.
15. No two men but being left alone with each other, enter into simpler relations.
16. Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party.
The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.
17. He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes.
We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.
according to the Latin proverb;—you can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos inquinat, æquat. To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot.
The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.
21. The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood.
22. It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love.
23. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.
I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse.
though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own.
But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions, not with yourself but with your lusters, and I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you.
24. It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet.
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.
The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms, and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.
Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a different breeding, different religion, and greater intellectual activity, would have modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of philosophers or divines.
Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.
seems not worth his while to be solemn, and
denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold.
do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
I see not any road to perfect peace which a man can walk, but to take counsel of his own bosom.
Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live.
Our Exploring Expedition saw the Fiji Islanders getting their dinner off human bones; and they are said to eat their own wives and children.
Gentility is mean, and gentilesse is obsolete.
But memory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence of these sudden masters.
A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring.
It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery, and be sold.
Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.
