For Auld Lang Syne | Page 4

thrive on varied good,
And he who gathers from a host

Of friendly hearts his daily food,
Is the best friend that we can boast.
--Holland.

I exhort you to lay the foundations of virtue, without which friendship
cannot exist, in such a manner that, with this one exception, you may
consider that nothing in the world is more excellent than friendship.
--Cicero.

It is a beautiful thing to feel that our friends are God's gifts to us.
Thinking of it has made me understand why we love and are loved,
sometimes when we cannot explain what causes the feeling. Feeling so
makes friendship such a sacred, holy thing!
--Porter.

If my brother, or kinsman, will be my friend, I ought to prefer him
before a stranger; or I show little duty or nature to my parents.
And as we ought to prefer our kindred in point of affection, so, too, in
point of charity, if equally needing and deserving.
--Penn.

It is equally impossible to forget our friends, and to make them answer
to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep
them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our
actual friends that we may go out and meet their ideal cousins!
--Thoreau.

I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were
mine--wild, delicate, throbbing property in his virtues. I feel as warmly
when he is praised as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged
maiden.
--Emerson.

In very many cases of friendship, or what passes for it, the old axiom is
reversed, and like clings to unlike more than to like.
--Dickens.

Hearts are linked to hearts by God. The friend on whose fidelity you
can count, whose success in life flushes your cheek with honest
satisfaction, whose triumphant career you have traced and read with a
heart throbbing almost as if it were a thing alive, for whose honor you

would answer as for your own; that friend, given to you by
circumstances over which you have no control, was God's own gift.
--Robertson.

If thou neglect thy love to thy neighbor, in vain thou professest thy love
to God.
--Quarles.

I cannot contentedly frame a prayer for myself in particular, without a
catalogue for my friends; nor request a happiness, wherein my sociable
disposition doth not desire the fellowship of my neighbor.
--Browne.

It's an owercome sooth for age an' youth
And it brooks wi' nae denial,

That the dearest friends are the auldest friends
And the young are
just on trial.
There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld
And it's him that has bereft
me;
For the surest friends are the auldest friends
And the maist o'
mine hae left me.
There are kind hearts still, for friends to fill
And fools to take and
break them;
But the nearest friends are the auldest friends
And the
grave's the place to seek them.
--Stevenson.

God divided man into men that they might help each other.

--Seneca.

I sometimes hear my friends complain finely that I do not appreciate
their fineness. I shall not tell them whether I do or not. As if they
expected a vote of thanks for every fine thing which they uttered or did!
Who knows but it was finely appreciated? It may be that your silence
was the finer thing of the two.... In human intercourse the tragedy
begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when
silence is not understood. Then there can never be an explanation.
--Thoreau.

It is a friendly heart that has plenty of friends.
--Thackeray.

It is not becoming to turn from friends in adversity, but then it is for
those who have basked in the sunshine of their prosperity to adhere to
them. No one was ever so foolish as to select the unfortunate for their
friends.
--Lucanus.

It is essential to friendship that there be no labor to pass for more than
we are, no effort, no anxiety to hide! If anything be concealed, the
constant intercourse of friends will discover it, and one discovery will
produce others. The idea that the heart has one secret fold extinguishes
affection.
--Channing.

Impatient and uncertain lovers think that they must say or do something
kind whenever they meet; they must never be cold. But they who are
friends do not do what they think they must, but what they must. Even
their friendship is, in one sense, a sublime phenomenon to them.
--Thoreau.

It is a good and safe rule to sojourn in many places, as if you meant to
spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness
or speaking a true word or making a friend.
--Ruskin.

It has seemed to me lately more possible than