There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
Interpretation
True friendship requires trust, and trust is built on honesty and integrity.
This quote emphasizes the fundamental components of a genuine friendship, which are confidence and integrity. It suggests that for a friendship to thrive, both parties must have a foundational trust in each other, and that trust can only be established and maintained through integrity and honesty in their actions and words.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of relationships, one might use this quote to highlight the role of trust.
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
I've been an important star and lived a full life, yet I only hve three close friends. I guess that's all anyone can expect.
There can be no Friendship where there is no Freedom. Friendship loves a free Air, and will not be penned up in straight and narrow Enclosures. It will speak freely, and act so too; and take nothing ill where no ill is meant; nay, where it is, 'twill easily forgive, and forget too, upon small Acknowledgments.
It takes two flints to make a fire.
Frank Zappa was one of the gods of the Czech underground, I thought of him as a friend. Whenever I feel like escaping from the world of the Presidency, I think of him.
The heart of a friend gives out sufficient light for us in the dark to rise by.
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
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