We should learn from Jesus that the essential quality in the heart of friendship is not the desire to have friends, but the desire to be a friend; not to get good and help from others, but to impart blessing to others. Many of the sighings for friendship which we have are merely selfish longings, a desire for happiness, for pleasure, for the gratification of the heart, which friends bring. If the desire were to be a friend, to do others good, to serve and to give help, it would be a far more Christlike longing, and would transform the life and character.

In all things be courteous to thy friend, as to thyself; for is he not thy better self? Love your friend with his foible.

Take to your heart no friend whose affection requires proof; proof implies doubt, and where doubt is, love is not.

Rejoice in all the honors which come to those you know. That you know them makes you, in a sense, a partner in their fame; that you rejoice with them brings you their friendship.

To distrust a friend is a double folly; for why did you take for friend one that could be distrusted? and why do you keep him? Trust IS friendship.

J. R.
Miller
"Personal
Friend-
ship of

Jesus"

Christopher Bannister

Old
Saying

Jacob
de Groot

Henry Worthington

Bryant

A.
Wooster

III

THE STUMBLING BLOCKS

He who bereaves friendship of mutual respect takes from it its greatest ornament.

You should know the customs of a friend, but not take a dislike to them.

I have scarce a married friend of my acquaintance upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship did not commence after the period of his marriage. With some limitations, they (the wives) can endure that; but that the good man should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they knew him, before they that are now man and wife ever met, this is intolerable to them.

That man may last, but never lives,
Who much receives but nothing gives;
Whom none can love, whom none can thank,
Creation's blot, creation's blank.

A friend is a rare book, of which but one copy is made. We read a page of it every day, till some woman snatches it from our hands, who sometimes peruses it, but more frequently tears it.

The better the lover, the poorer the friend.

Whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.

Cicero

Proverb

Charles Lamb "Essays of Elia"

Thomas Gibbons

Author
Unknown

John
Holden

Francis

Bacon