Friendship (n.) rarely inflames one to risk the utmost for an idea; more often comradeship teaches both to chaffer and not take the world to heart. Only the God-relationship is the true idealizing friendship.
Friendship (n.) like erotic love is a consequence of partiality: its object is named for the preference — “the friend,” loved above all the rest of the world.
Friendship (n.) loves by similarity — the likeness by which two differ from other men — and so the pair can become one selfish self.
Friendship (n.) turns false when it says “Spare yourself, lessen your demands, and we shall live a beautiful life together” — it wants only to defraud you of God and have you help it deceive itself.
Friendship (n.) that lapses when a request is refused, to be resumed when the friend changes, is regarded by men as magnanimous — and is not love.
Friendship (n.) is marked, antiquity says, by wanting and refusing the same things — which is also extremely tiresome.
Friendship (n.) is two people vowing to be everything to one another, though it is impossible for one human being to be anything to another except to be in his way.
Friendship (n.) should lie fallow now and then, as the experienced farmer lets his land lie — never stick fast.
Friendship (n.) is a late bloom after marriage, like trees that bear flowers after the fruit, so that flower and fruit are contemporary.
Friendship (n.) has as its absolute condition agreement in a life view; then friends who look at each other do not laugh like the Roman augurs but grow serious.
Friendship (n.) founded on moral agreement survives the friend's death, for he lives on transfigured in the other; founded on mere sympathy, it is the lovebirds' bond, where one's death is the other's.
Friendship (n.) offers no human security even with God: who suffered more, was more tried, than the pious man who was God's friend?
Friendship (n.) failed Christ at the decisive moment: the friends who argued over the places at his right and left fled, and two robbers were compelled to fill the empty places beside him on the cross.