Friendship Quotes

“Friendship is about the good, it leads us to the good, and it is good.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“To the objection that Christian love is extended to all people but friendship involves mutuality, Aquinas says that when we love a friend, we love everything about that friend. Thus our love will want to expand to include the friends of our friend, even if those friends have no other connection to us. 'When a man has friendship for a certain person, for his sake he loves all belonging to him, be they children, servants, or connected with him in any way. Indeed, so much do we love our friends, that for their sake we love all who belong to them, even if they hurt or hate us.' So when we love God, we also love those whom God loves. Each human being is, potentially, a friend of God. So whenever one human being, a friend of God, is loving God, that love is naturally extended to all the other friends of God--that is, to all other people insofar as they are also friends or potential friends of God. This is why we love our enemies: they too belong to God in that God's love extends to his enemies also.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“I believe the book of Job does not show us an answer to the problem of evil but rather an answer to the question of human nature. What are we humans really? Job says: we are precious beings, capable of discourse with God, beings who should strive to accomplish friendship with each other.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“Dear reader, here is a sad truth: you and I fall short of being humans. We own up to this when we admit to being sinners. Sin is not something we add to ourselves and need to get rid of (although it can feel like that; our sins constitute a 'burden' that 'is intolerable,' according to a traditional prayer, and the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of 'the sin that clings so closely' [12:1 NRSV]). Rather, sin actually is a defect, a falling short on our part of living up to our nature, a failure to be human in the full sense. We sinners, who live among sinners, never have seen in the flesh a totally real human being. The astonishing claim is that Jesus is the one, true, complete human being.

So when we say that Jesus is like us in all things except sin, we are not saying that we have something, 'sin,' which Jesus fails to have. It's the opposite: Jesus has something we do not have--namely, full humanity from which nothing has been broken off and taken away.

And yet, sinners that we be, we do have Jesus...”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“With hope for that ultimate intimacy, here are some rules for human beings in this life:

Sexual relations outside marriage are wrong, without regard to class, gender, or other human differentiation.

Human happiness and flourishing is thoroughly compatible with sexual abstinence.

The flourishing of human beings does not lie in marriage but in being able to live with others as friends, and marriage itself should be understood, in its ultimate sense, as being oriented to friendship.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“In this imperfect world, finite and mystifying, communications can be difficult. Sometimes friends need to tell us things that we don't want to hear but are good for us. Sometimes friends tell us things that they think we need to hear even though they are not good for us. No words are perfect, no communication perfect, in this world of ours.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“The initiation of a friendship may be a mystery. Someone comes into your life, and you are attracted to him, to how he sees the world, or perhaps to how he is, how he comports himself, how he acts in the world. A classmate, an office worker, a barista, someone who goes to your church: it can happen in any part of life, the recognition that here is a person you'd like to get to know better. This person and I might be able to become friends.

The development of a friendship is different. Development doesn't 'just happen'; you must choose to spend time together doing various things and talking....

Friendship takes time and a certain measure of deliberation. One seeks opportunities to meet fact to face; between meetings, one tries to talk, or write, or email, or text. The physical meeting needs to happen: from the ancients to today, those who think about friendship realize the irreplaceability of being in the same space, breathing the same atmosphere.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“If we are children of God, we are not so in any childish way or inferior way. The point of grace is that we are no longer mere creatures, mere subordinates or servants or slaves. We are also no longer children in the sense of being immature.... We remain creatures, yes; we remain God's servants, one might even say his slaves, but Jesus no longer calls us servants! We remain creatures, yet we know the intimacy that comes from the Son sharing his mind with us. Our obedience is free. We have the dignity of being a friend of our truest friend.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“Prayer is our being placed within the being of God: the Spirit, within us, prays through Jesus to the Father.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“Sex, apart from its casual use..., is a movement toward one other person to the exclusion of others. Friendship is a movement toward another person that does not exclude others.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“...something can be a good thing and yet not a necessary thing. It is good for people to be expert at brain surgery. But if you are not a brain surgeon, you are no less human. Or a different sort of analogy: it is good for human beings to have language, but one is no less human if one's language is French rather than Mandarin Chinese, or Sign rather than English. Or yet another: a child, once she exists, is a unique good, but prior to coming into being, she was not necessary. So marriage and be good without being needful; although good, it is not a 'manner of life' that all people should enter. And even though not all people need marry, that does not make it a bad thing.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“Pleasure is good in itself, and great pleasures are to be particularly valued, for they are signs of the goodness of God. The best pleasures are shared. Yet it is not necessary to our human flourishing that we have any of them in particular. The traditional Christian teaching is that the goodness of sexual union lies in marriage, but one who does not experience this good has no more a diminishment of human flourishing than a person who never jumps out of an airplane.

To speak broadly, all pleasures should be understood as ways of binding people together....”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“It is a sex-saturated world out there, but some people would be open to hearing from the church that an alternative exists, something that is not negative (focusing on what you are not doing--namely, not having sex) but, to the contrary, positive (what you are doing--namely, building real intimacy in friendship).”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“Consider again the life of Jesus. He, according to all reliable testimony, did not experience sexual relations. Yet despite this, faith attests him as the one complete human being....To be faithful to the revelation in Jesus, we must say that the experience of sexual union is not needed for a full and complete human life.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“If friendship is the point of human life, we seem to have a problem with Jesus' rightly famous teaching that we should love our neighbor, indeed, that we should love even our enemy. It certainly seems that friendship and this commanded love (shall we call it 'Christian love'?) stand at odds. Friendship is particular, but Christian love is universal. Friendship is reciprocal, but Christian love is unidirectional. Friendship is drawn to the good and thus discriminates, unlike the rain that falls on the just and the unjust alike....The word translated 'love' here [in Matt. 5:44-45] is agape, and agape is generally taken as self-giving performed selflessly. It is taken as altruism, a turning to the other without regard to who the other is. It is said to act without regard for any internal attraction to the beloved, in distinction from erotic love, eros, which builds upon such attraction. And it is said to lack the particularity that characterizes philia, which is friendship.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“...hearing is at the heart of obedience. The '-edi-' in 'obedience' is from audire, from which we also get 'audio': obedience is about hearing with someone else (in hippie jargon, being tuned in to the same wavelength)....True obedience is not so much a bending of the will as it is a work of the intellect leading the will.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human