There is nothing worth the wear of winning, but laughter and the love of friends.
James BoswellRead
A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True friendship goes beyond superficial qualities and embraces the entire person.
This quote by James Boswell emphasizes the distinction between companionship and true friendship. While a companion may appreciate certain agreeable traits in a person, a true friend values and loves the individual for who they are in their entirety, including their flaws and imperfections.
Themes
FriendshipLoveCompanionshipQualitiesAcceptance
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of genuine relationships, you might quote this to highlight the difference between friends and mere acquaintances.
More from James Boswell
All quotes βHe who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
James BoswellRead
Friendship, "the wine of life," should, like a well-stocked cellar, be continually renewed.
James BoswellRead
Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others. Sometimes it does. But the danger is, that while a man grows better pleased with himself, he may be growing less pleasing to others. Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has presented.
James BoswellRead
Similar quotes
There's something about losing friends, particularly young people, where it's not something that you get over. I don't believe there's a healing process.
Chris CornellRead
Oh how sweet it is to hear one's own convictions from another's lips.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
Willa CatherRead
You've got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.
Joe BidenRead
Haec ego non multis (scribo), sed tibi: satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus. I am writing this not to many, but to you: certainly we are a great enough audience for each other.
EpicurusRead
Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyRead