Help others solve their problems; standing farther away, you can often see matters more clearly than they do. . . The greatest service you can render someone else is helping him or her help themselves.
Baltasar GracianRead
True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.
Interpretation
True friendship enhances our lives and helps us cope with hardships.
This quote emphasizes the transformative power of genuine friendship, suggesting that true friends amplify our joys and help mitigate our sorrows. The metaphor of life without friends being akin to being stranded on a desert island highlights the isolation one might feel without companionship, while recognizing that finding and maintaining a loyal friend is a rare and invaluable gift.
In practice
During a speech at a graduation ceremony.
Help others solve their problems; standing farther away, you can often see matters more clearly than they do. . . The greatest service you can render someone else is helping him or her help themselves.
It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.
Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than grave teaching.
It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards.
Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others.
The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.
A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
Young friends, do not hesitate to follow the example of Pedro, who 'pleased God and was loved by him' and who, having come to perfection in so short a time, lived a full life.
To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.
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.
No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.
You don't appreciate things until they're gone. For me, I miss my friends; I don't miss boxing, I miss the camaraderie.
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