A Life Well Lived: Friendship

“No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends.”

Jesus Christ (John 15:15)

“The little knot of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.”

“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. . . . Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth."

C.S. Lewis

“Impersonal words begin to dominate our conversation—dysfunctional, resource, consumer, problem, victim, client, asset, liability, loser, winner. The minute we start using these words to describe other people, we mount an assault on the possibilities, if not the actualities, of friendship.”

Eugene Peterson

“So my plan is spoilt! . . . It is no good trying to escape you. But I’m glad, Sam. I cannot tell you how glad.”

Frodo Baggins

"A queer and almost mad notion seems to have got into the modern head that, if you mix up everybody and everything more or less anyhow, the mixture may be called unity, and the unity may be called peace. It is supposed that, if you break down all doors and walls so that there is no domesticity, there will then be nothing but friendship. Surely somebody must have noticed by this time that the men living in a hotel quarrel at least as often as the men living in a street."

G.K. Chesterton

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”

“The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”

“A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven't hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.”

Robert Frost