A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
Interpretation
A true friend allows you to be open and honest without fear of judgment.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of sincerity and open communication in friendship. A genuine friend provides a safe space where one can express thoughts and feelings freely, fostering a deeper and more authentic connection that goes beyond superficial interactions.
In practice
During a speech about the value of friendships at a community event.
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?
One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.
Robert Mapplethorpe, I met in 1967. He was a student at Pratt, though even as a student a fully formed artist. We went through many things in our life together. He became my loved one, then my best friend.
Reprove your friends in secret, praise them openly.
We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.
What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
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