When the strong box contains no more both friends and flatterers shun the door.
Interpretation
True friends are those who stay by your side regardless of your wealth or status.
This quote by Plutarch highlights the idea that many people are drawn to wealth and status rather than true friendship. When someone loses their riches, those who were only interested in them for their fortune may abandon them, while genuine friends remain steadfast, revealing the true nature of relationships based on sincerity rather than materialism.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of loyalty, one might reference this quote.
Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face, where the character is revealed, than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men.
It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him; for the one is only belief - the other contempt.
Come back with your shield - or on it
The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.
For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.
Our senses through ignorance of Reality, falsely tell us that what appears to be, is. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real
The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.
Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.
Friendship, "the wine of life," should, like a well-stocked cellar, be continually renewed.
Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.
Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.
Friends are to be feared, not so much for what they make us do as what they keep us from doing.
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