A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.
Interpretation
A true friend allows for open honesty and authenticity. In their presence, one can be completely oneself without pretense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the profound nature of true friendship, emphasizing that a genuine friend is someone with whom one can be completely sincere and honest. This relationship enables an individual to express their thoughts freely and authentically, shedding societal masks and pretenses, much like elements in chemistry that interact at a fundamental level. In essence, true friendship allows for a bond where individuals connect on a deeper, more genuine plane.
In practice
In a speech about the value of friendship, you might reference this quote to illustrate how true friends allow us to be ourselves.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones.
Good friends are hard to find and impossible to forget.
A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies.
A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.
But some part of him realized, even as he fought to break free from Lupin, that Sirius had never kept him waiting before. . . . Sirius had risked everything, always, to see Harry, to help him. . . . If Sirius was not reappearing out of that archway when Harry was yelling for him as though his life depended on it, the only possible explanation was that he could not come back. . . . That he really was . . .
We fought in 1974 - that was a long time ago. After 1981, we became the best of friends. By 1984, we loved each other. I am not closer to anyone else in this life than I am to Muhammad Ali. Why? We were forged by that first fight in Zaire, and our lives are indelibly linked by memories and photographs, as young men and old men.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.