Friendship

Don’t leave me here all alone! It’s your Sam calling. Don’t go where I can’t follow! Wake up, Mr Frodo!

Rebekka is a professional artist. She finds beauty in everything—even in me. Her delight in me gives me hope that in my murky, mixed-up soul there remains a burning loveliness that only God could have placed there, and that he is cultivating. For years now, she and I, together with other close friends, have grappled with the gospel in the warp and woof of our daily lives. She helps me to believe.

There’s a debate in our culture about what really makes us happy, which is summarized by, on the one hand, the book “On the Road” and, on the other, the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The former celebrates the life of freedom and adventure. The latter celebrates roots and connections. Research over the past thirty years makes it clear that what the inner mind really wants is connection. “It’s a Wonderful Life” was right. Joining a group that meets just once a month produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income. According to research by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, and others, the daily activities most closely associated with happiness are social—having sex, socializing after work, and having dinner with friends. Many of the professions that correlate most closely with happiness are also social—a corporate manager, a hairdresser.

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.

It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours, and you’ll drift in that direction.

Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. 

Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.

Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you.

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh!" he whispered. "Yes, Piglet?" "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you.” ― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner “If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together... there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart... I'll always be with you.” “Some people care too much. I think it's called love.” “You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” “It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?” “Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” “I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.” “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” “I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.” “Sometimes,' said Pooh, 'the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.” “Promise me you'll never forget me because if I thought you would, I'd never leave.” “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” “What day is it?" It's today," squeaked Piglet. My favorite day," said Pooh.” “I used to believe in forever, but forever's too good to be true” “The things that make me different are the things that make me.” “I don’t feel very much like Pooh today," said Pooh. "There there," said Piglet. "I’ll bring you tea and honey until you do.” “Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” “It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily. "So it is." "And freezing." "Is it?" "Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately.” “Oh Tigger, where are your manners?" "I don’t know, but I bet they’re having more fun than I am.”

Friendship is—in a sense not at all derogatory to it—the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary. It has least commerce with our nerves; there is nothing throaty about it; nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale. It is essentially between individuals; the moment two men are friends they have in some degree drawn apart together from the herd. Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship. The species, biologically considered, has no need of it.

Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but “A’s part in C,” while C loses not only A but “A’s part in B.” In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love “to divide is not to take away.”

No one ever influenced Tolkien — you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch. We listened to his work, but could only affect it by encouragement. He has only two reactions to criticism; either he begins the whole work again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all.

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

Theologians have sometimes asked whether we shall ‘know one another’ in Heaven, and whether the particular love-relations worked out on earth would then continue to have any significance. It seems reasonable to reply: ‘It may depend on what kind of love it had become, or was becoming, on earth.’ For, surely, to meet in the eternal world someone for whom your love in this, however strong, had been merely natural, would not be (on that ground) even interesting. Would it not be like meeting in adult life someone who had seemed to be a great friend at your preparatory school solely because of common interests and occupations? If there was nothing more, if he was not a kindred soul, he will now be a total stranger. Neither of you now plays conkers. You no longer want to swop your help with his French exercise for his help with your arithmetic. In Heaven, I suspect, a love that had never embodied Love Himself would be equally irrelevant. For Nature has passed away. All that is not eternal is eternally out of date. From The Four Loves The Four Loves. Copyright © 1960 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

It was when he tried to talk about 'the boat' that his words began to falter and tears welled up in his eyes...Finally, watching Joe struggle for composure over and over, I realized that 'the boat' was something more than just the shell or its crew. To Joe, it encompassed but transcended both - it was something mysterious and almost beyond definition. It was a shared experience - a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone, when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love. Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it.

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual — a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher — and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord.

Sonja never found out the exact reason why they weren’t charged for any of the food they ate in José’s restaurant that week. But she laughed until she was positively simmering every time the little Spanish man who owned the restaurant lit up like a sun when he saw Ove, held out his arms, and exclaimed: “Señor Saab!!!”

And if Anita hadn’t known better, she could have sworn that in the minutes that followed she heard Rune laughing out loud several times. Chapter 36. A Man Called Ove and a Whiskey

"I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." — Bilbo Baggins

‘And now,’ said the wizard, turning back to Frodo, ‘the decision lies with you. But I will always help you.’ He laid his hand on Frodo’s shoulder. ‘I will help you bear this burden, as long as it is yours to bear. But we must do something, soon. The Enemy is moving.’

You will meet many foes, some open, and some disguised; and you may find friends upon your way when you least look for it.

Frodo. ‘Yes,’ he said with a smile. ‘I ask leave once again to be your companion, Frodo.’

It is true that if these hobbits understood the danger, they would not dare to go. But they would still wish to go, or wish that they dared, and be shamed and unhappy.

‘I am content. And I don’t miss Gandalf’s fireworks, but his bushy eyebrows, and his quick temper, and his voice.’

‘It’s saying a lot too much,’ said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again. ‘Why, Sam,’ he said, ‘to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. “I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?”’

My lord does not issue any command to you, he begs you only to remember old friendship and oaths long spoken, and for your own good to do all that you may.

Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.’

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'

Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself …’

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself is an enemy to friendship.

...I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.

Cancel culture has made people disposable in a world where everyone is desperate to feel needed and known.

Friendship is not just proximity; it is presence with purpose.

Real friendships help liberate us from the bondage of isolation.

God is One, yet God is We.

You are the crescendo of creation—God’s crown jewel.

Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.