What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
Interpretation
Genuine friendship begins when individuals share their vulnerabilities with each other.
In this quote, Arthur C. Clarke emphasizes that true friendship is built on a foundation of trust and openness. By revealing their vulnerabilities to one another, individuals deepen their connection and foster a sense of mutual understanding and support, marking the beginning of a genuine and lasting friendship.
In practice
In a speech about the value of relationships, you might say, 'As Arthur C. Clarke wisely observed, genuine friendship begins when we share our vulnerabilities.'
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
Of what shall we be proud of if we are not proud of our friends?
You're brave. You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don't care if you are imaginary.
And let your best be for your friend. If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also. For what is your friend that your should seek with him hours to kill? Seek with him always hours to live. For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness. And in the sweetness of friendship, let there be laughter, and the sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.
I think if you're lucky enough to be in a band with your best friends, and you look at the world in the right way, than you understand that everything that's happening to you can be alchemized.
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