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Title: The Golden Link of Friendship

Author: Various

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

Language: English

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

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOLDEN LINK OF FRIENDSHIP ***

SESAME BOOKLETS

LATEST ADDITIONS TO
SESAME BOOKLETS

41. Rab and his Friends. Brown.
42. Marjorie Fleming. Brown.
43. Poems of the East.
44. Gems from Balzac.
45. Thoughts from Tolstoi.
46. Thoughts from Jerome K. Jerome.
47. Thoughts from H. G. Wells.
48. Thoughts from E. F. Benson.
49. Thoughts from Augustine Birrell.
50. Thoughts from G. K. Chesterton.

SESAME BOOKLETS

The
Golden Link of
Friendship

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

"A link to bind when circumstances part;
A nerve of feeling stretched from heart to heart."

The Riverside Press Ltd., Edinburgh

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 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.

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

Great souls by instinct to each other turn,
Demand alliance, and in friendship burn.

Addison

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

Emerson

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

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

Hand
Grasps hand, eye lights eye in good friendship,
And great hearts expand,
And grow one in the sense of this world's life.

Robert Browning

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

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

Proverbs xviii. 24

You'll never hope
To be such friends, for instance she and you,
As when you hunted cowslips in the woods
Or played together in the meadow hay.
Oh yes—with age, respect comes, and your worth
Is felt, there's growing sympathy of tastes,
There's ripened friendship, there's confirmed esteem.

Robert Browning

Plant thou the tree of friendship only; so shall thy heart's desire bear fruit:
Uproot thou hatred's plant completely, or woes unnumbered thence may shoot.

Hafiz

Sacredness of Friendship

Friendship's an abstract of this noble flame,
'Tis love refin'd, and purged from all its dross,
'Tis next to angels' love, if not the same,
As strong in passion is, though not so gross.

Catherine Philips

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

Friendship, peculiar boon of Heaven,
The noble mind's delight and pride,
To men and angels only given,
To all the lower world denied.

Samuel Johnson

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

Douglas Jerrold

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

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

"You will forgive me, I hope, for the sake of the friendship between us,
Which is too true and too sacred to be so easily broken!"

Longfellow

He that wrongs his friend
Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about
A silent court of justice in his breast,
Himself the judge and jury, and himself
The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd:
And that drags down his life.

Tennyson

Friendship is the marriage of the soul.

Voltaire

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

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

The pledge of Friendship! it is still divine,
Though watery floods have quenched its burning wine;
Whatever vase the sacred drops may hold,
The gourd, the shell, the cup of beaten gold,
Around its brim the bond of Nature throws
A garland sweeter than the banquet's rose.

O. W. Holmes

O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

Emerson

Friend is a word of royal tone;
Friend is a poem all alone.

From the Persian

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

Thick waters show no images of things;
Friends are each other's mirrors, and should be
Clearer than crystal, or the mountain-springs,
And free from clouds, design, or flattery.
For vulgar souls no part of friendship share;
Poets and friends are born to what they are.

Catherine Philips

Choice of Friendship

First on thy friend deliberate with thyself,
Pause, ponder, sift; not eager in the choice,
Nor jealous of the chosen: fixing, fix;—
Judge before friendship, then confide till death.

Young

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

Fielding

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

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

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade.

Shakespeare

He makes no friend who never made a foe.

Tennyson

Who friendship with a knave hath made
Is judg'd a partner in the trade.

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

Friendship sealed by companionship in sin will not last long.

Arnot

Eschew that friend, if thou art wise,
Who consorts with thy enemies.

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

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

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

You're my friend—
What a thing friendship is, world without end!
How it gives the heart and soul a stir up!

Robert Browning

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

O, weary hearts! O, slumbering eyes!
O, drooping souls, whose destinies
Are fraught with fear and pain,
Ye shall be loved again!

No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.

Responds,—as if with unseen wings,
An angel touched its quivering strings;
And whispers, in its song,
Where hast thou stayed so long?

Longfellow

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

Friendship, mysterious cement of the soul,
Sweetener of life, and solder of society,
I owe thee much: thou hast deserv'd from me
Far, far beyond what I can ever pay.

Blair

Not all the works of Science, Art,
Or Genius in this world are worth
One genuine sigh that from the heart
Friendship or Love draws freshly forth.

Thomas Moore

Friendship always benefits, while love sometimes injures.

Seneca

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

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

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
But he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

Oriental Proverb

Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,
A poet or a friend to find;
Behold, he watches at the door,
Behold his shadow on the floor.

Emerson

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

A friend
Welded into our life is more to us
Than twice five thousand kinsmen, one in blood.

Euripides

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

Anna R. Brown

Dear is my friend—yet from my foe, as from my friend comes good:
My friend shows what I can do, and my foe what I should.

Schiller

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

German Proverb

Love is flower-like;
Friendship is like a sheltering tree.

Coleridge

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

Shakespeare

A faithful friend is the medicine of life.

Ecclesiasticus

"I know and esteem you, and feel that your nature is noble,
Lifting mine up to a higher, a more ethereal level,
Therefore I value your friendship."

Longfellow

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

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

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

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

Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.

Tennyson

True friendship's laws are by this rule express'd,
Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

Homer

Service of Friendship

The services which cement friendship are reciprocal services.

William Smith

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

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

A. Bronson Alcott

Faithful are the wounds of a friend,
But the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart:
So doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel.
Iron sharpeneth iron;
So a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.

Proverbs xxvii. 6, 9, 17

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals.

Goldsmith

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

Here around the ingle bleezing,
Wha sae happy and sae free;
Tho' the northern wind blaws freezing,
Frien'ship warms baith you and me.

Burns

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

A. Bronson Alcott

Where you have friends you should not go to inns.

George Eliot

More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

Tennyson

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

Thackeray

I take of worthy men whate'er they give:
Their heart I gladly take, if not, their hand;
If that, too, is withheld, a courteous word,
Or the civility of placid looks.

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

He who will not to friends' advice attend;
Must not complain when they him reprehend.

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

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

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

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

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

We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together:
And wheresoe'er we went like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled, and inseparable.

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

A generous friendship no cold medium knows,
Burns with one love, with one resentment glows,
One should our interests and our passions be,
My friend must hate the man that injures me.

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.

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

"Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship
Let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!"

Longfellow

Friendship like love is but a name,
Unless to one you stint the flame.
The child, whom many fathers share,
Hath seldom known a father's care.
'Tis thus in friendships; who depend
On many, rarely find a friend.

Gay

There must be many a pair of friends
Who, arm in arm, deserve the warm
Moon-births and the long evening-ends.
So, for their sake, be May still May!

Robert Browning

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

Anon

Joy of Friendship

Life is to be fortified by many friendships.
To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.

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

What joy is better than the news of friends
Whose memories were a solace to me oft,
As mountain-baths to wild fowls in their flight.

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

Let us, then, be what we are, and speak what we think, and in all things
Keep ourselves loyal to truth, and the sacred professions 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

The man that hails you Tom or Jack,
And proves by thumps upon your back
How he esteems your merit,
Is such a friend that one had need
Be very much his friend indeed
To pardon or to bear it.

Cowper

I have not from your eyes that gentleness,
And show of love, as I was wont to have;
You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand,
Over your friend that loves you.

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

I am weary
Of the bewildering masquerade of Life,
Where strangers walk as friends and friends as strangers;
Where whispers overheard betray false hearts;
And through the mazes of the crowd we chase
Some form of loveliness, that smiles, and beckons,
And cheats us with fair words, only to leave us
A mockery and a jest; maddened, confused,—
Not knowing friend from foe.

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

A foe to God was ne'er true friend to man,
Some sinister intent taints all he does.

Young

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

Hazlitt

Think not thy friend one who in fortune's hour
Boasts of his friendship and fraternity.
Him I call friend who sums up all his power
To aid thee in distress and misery.

Saadi

Constancy of Friendship

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

Proverbs xvii. 17

Oh happy days, oh early friends,
How Life since then hath lost its flowers!
But yet—tho' Time some foliage rends,
The stem, the Friendship, still is ours;
And long may it endure, as green
And fresh as it hath always been!

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

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne?

Burns

There is no treasure the which may be compared unto a faithful friend;
Gold soone decayeth, and worldly wealth consumeth and wasteth in the winde:
But love once planted in a perfect and pure minde endureth weale or woe;
The frownes of fortune, come they never so unkinde, cannot the same overthrowe.

Roxburghe Ballads

I am not of that feather to shake off
My friend when he must need me.

Shakespeare

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

Lord Chesterfield

Love is and was my Lord and King,
And in his presence I attend
To hear the tidings of my friend,
Which every hour his couriers bring.

Tennyson

So Life's year begins and closes;
Days, though short'ning, still can shine;
What though youth gave love and roses,
Age still leaves us friends and wine.

Thomas Moore

"Let all be forgotten between us—
All save the dear old friendship, and that shall grow older and dearer.

Longfellow

Lack of Friends

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

Bacon

Ill-starred, indeed, is he who injures men:
Is fortune adverse, he is friendless then.

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 another himself. 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

Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.

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

Each spoke words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother:
They parted—ne'er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining—
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between.
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.

Coleridge

Loss of Friends

What greetings smile, what farewells wave,
What loved ones enter and depart!
The good, the beautiful, the brave,
The Heaven-lent treasures of the heart!
How conscious seems the frozen sod
And beechen slope whereon they trod!
The oak-leaves rustle, and the dry grass bends
Beneath the shadowy feet of lost or absent friends.

Whittier

O friend! O best of friends! Thy absence more
Than the impending night darkens the landscape o'er!

Longfellow

What shall I do, my friend,
When you are gone forever?
My heart its eager need will send
Through the years to find you never,
And how will it be with you,
In the weary world I wonder,
Will you love me with a love as true,
When our paths be far asunder?

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

Alas! how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love!—
Hearts, that the world in vain had tried
And sorrow but more closely tied;
That stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off:—
Like ships that have gone down at sea,
When heaven is all tranquillity!

Thomas Moore

Waste not the hour of friendship; outside this House of Two Doors
Friends shall soon part asunder, no more together wending.

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.

2 Samuel i. 25, 26

Some tears fell down my cheeks and then I smiled,
As those smile who have no face in the world
To smile back to them. I had lost a friend.

Mrs Browning

Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.

Tennyson

To wail friends lost
Is not by much so wholesome—profitable,
As to rejoice at friends but newly found.

Shakespeare

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

Henry D. Thoreau

Immortality of Friendship

A day for toil, an hour for sport,
But for a friend is life too short.

Emerson

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

Anna R. Brown

Love is a sudden blaze which soon decays,
Friendship is like the sun's eternal rays.

Gay

Fast as the rolling seasons bring
The hour of fate to those we love,
Each pearl that leaves the broken string
Is set in friendship's crown above.
As narrower grows the earthly chain,
The circle widens in the sky;
These are our treasures that remain,
But those are stars that beam on high.

O. W. Holmes

True friendship between man and man is infinite and immortal.

Plato

Sweet human hand and lips and eye,
Dear heavenly friend that canst not die;
Strange friend, past, present and to be;
Loved deeplier, darklier understood;
Behold I dream a dream of good,
And mingle all the world with thee.

Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.

Tennyson

Not mine the sad and freezing dream
Of souls that, with their earthly mould,
Cast off the loves and joys of old,—
    ·           ·           ·           ·           ·
No!—I have friends in Spirit Land,—
Not shadows in a shadowy band,
Not others, but themselves are they.
And still I think of them the same
As when the Master's summons came.

Whittier

The way is short, O friend,
That reaches out before us;
God's tender heavens above us bend,
His love is smiling o'er us;
A little while is ours
For sorrow or for laughter;
I'll lay the hand you love in yours
On the shore of the Hereafter.

Mary Clemmer

Yet less of sorrow lives in me
For days of happy commune dead;
Less yearning for the friendship fled,
Than some strong bond which is to be.

Tennyson

Index of Authors

Addison, 7

Alcott, A. B., 43, 44, 57

Anon, 26, 56, 57, 60, 68

Aristotle, 39

Arnot, 25

Bacon, 42, 44, 46, 47, 51, 58, 61, 76, 77, 83

Baillie, Joanna, 46

Ballads, Roxburghe, 74

Beecher, H. W., 69

Birrell, Augustine, 30

Black, Hugh, 9, 13, 18, 38, 42, 56

Blair, 31

Brown, Anna R., 32, 35, 87

Browning, Robert, 9, 11, 27, 55, 57

Browning, Mrs, 85

Bruyère, De la, 14

Burns, 44, 73

Byron, 28

Canticles, 26

Carlyle, 48

Channing, W. E., 42, 59, 65, 66, 79

Chesterfield, Lord, 75

Cicero, 7, 27, 37, 47

Clemmer, M., 82, 91

Coleridge, 35, 78, 80

Colton, 8, 32

Confucius, 22, 52, 79

Cowper, 62

Drummond, Henry, 15

Ebers, 68

Ecclesiasticus, 36, 67

Edwards, R., 83

Eliot, George, 45, 51, 58

Ellis, Mrs, 66

Emerson, 7, 8, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 28, 33, 39, 42, 53, 69, 78, 79, 87

Euripides, 34

Felltham, Owen, 69

Fénelon, 30

Fielding, 21

Franklin, B., 73

Gay, 24, 55, 87

Goldsmith, 38, 43

Gray, 77

Hafiz, 12, 84

Hare, J. C. and A. W., 70

Hazlitt, 66, 71

Holmes, O. W., 18, 59, 60, 88

Homer, 41

Jerrold, Douglas, 13

John, St, 25, 54

Johnson, Samuel, 13, 50

Jonson, Ben, 30

Keats, 50

Kingsley, C., 77

Longfellow, 15, 29, 33, 36, 54, 61, 64, 76, 82

MacDonald, George, 73

Montaigne, 37

Moore, Thomas, 31, 72, 75, 84

Ovid, 68

Patmore, Coventry, 61

Persian, From the, 19

Philips, Catherine, 12, 20

Plato, 40, 88

Plautus, 69

Plutarch, 25, 65

Pope, 53

Proverb, German, 35

Proverb, Oriental, 33

Proverbs, The, 11, 26, 43, 72

Quarles, 49

Robertson, F. W., 59

Roux, Joseph, 27, 38, 51, 58, 70, 83

Saadi, 10, 25, 47, 54, 60, 63, 71, 76

Sales, Francis de, 63

Samuel (Book of), 85

Schiller, 35

Scuderi, Mlle. de, 17

Selden, 52

Seneca, 31, 65

Shakespeare, 23, 30, 36, 52, 53, 62, 74, 86

Smith, Horace, 48

Smith, Sydney, 56

Smith, William, 41

Taylor, Jeremy, 8, 24, 32, 39, 40, 50

Tennyson, 16, 24, 41, 45, 75, 86, 89, 91

Thackeray, 9, 46

Theophrastus, 40

Thoreau, Henry D., 28, 70, 86

Thorold, Bishop, 34, 73

Throckmorton, Allan, 10

Voltaire, 16

Warwick, 67

Washington, George, 37

Whittier, 81, 90

Wilson, Thomas, 40

Wycherley, 63

Young, 21, 71

HERE ENDS NUMBER TWELVE OF SESAME BOOKLETS

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