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'.
Conversation with a friend will only bear good fruit of knowledge when both think only of the matter under consideration and forget that they are friends.
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.
from you, my dear Erasmus, let me obtain this request, that just as I bear with your ignorance in these matters, so you in turn will bear with my lack of eloquence.
The crest and crowning of all good, life's final star, is Brotherhood.
We must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.
When somebody shares, everybody wins.
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