The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [40]
3. ‘People who are always mentioning their services to their friends are a nuisance. The recipient ought to remember them; the performer should never mention them.
4. ‘In the case of friends, then, as the superior are bound to descend, so are they bound in a certain sense to raise those below them.
5. ‘The measure of your benefits should be in the first place your own power to bestow,
6. ‘And in the second place the capacity to bear them on the part of those on whom you bestow affection and help.
7. ‘For, however great your personal prestige may be, you cannot raise all your friends to the highest state.
8. ‘As a general rule, we must wait to make up our minds about friendships till men’s characters and years have reached their full maturity.
9. ‘People must not, for instance, regard as fast friends all whom in their youthful enthusiasm for hunting or football they liked because they shared the same tastes.
10. ‘For difference of character leads to difference of aims, and the result of such diversity is to estrange friends.
11. ‘Another good rule in friendship is this: do not let an excessive affection hinder the highest interests of your friends. This often happens.
12. ‘Our first aim should be to prevent a breach; our second, to secure that, if it does occur, our friendship should seem to have died a natural rather than a quarrelsome death.
13. ‘Next, we should take care that friendship is not converted into hostility, from which flow personal quarrels, abusive language and angry recriminations.
14. ‘By “worthy of friendship” I mean the friendship of those who have in themselves the qualities that attract affection.
15. ‘Such people are rare; and indeed all excellent things are rare; and nothing in the world is so hard to find as a thing entirely and completely perfect of its kind.
16. ‘But most people not only recognise nothing as good in our life unless it is profitable,
17. ‘But they also look upon friends as so much stock, caring most for those who will bring them most profit.
18. ‘Accordingly they never possess that most beautiful and most spontaneous friendship which exists solely for itself, without any ulterior motive.’
Chapter 13
1. ‘They fail also to learn about the nature and strength of friendship from their own feelings.
2. ‘For everyone loves himself, not for any reward which such love may bring, but because he is dear to himself independently of anything else.
3. ‘But unless this feeling is transferred to another, true friendship will never be understood; for a true friend is, as Aristotle says, a kind of second self.
4. ‘Most people unreasonably want such a friend as they are unable to be themselves, and expect from their friends what they do not themselves give.
5. ‘The fair course is first to be good yourself, and then to look out for another of like character.
6. ‘It is between such that the stability in friendship we have been talking about can be secured;
7. ‘When, that is to say, those who are united by affection learn, first of all, to rule those passions which enslave others,
8. ‘And secondly to take delight in fair and equitable conduct, to bear each other’s burdens,
9. ‘Never to ask each other for anything inconsistent with virtue and rectitude, and not only to serve and love but also to respect each other.
10. ‘I say “respect”, Fannius; for if respect is gone, friendship has lost its brightest jewel.
11. ‘And this shows the mistake of those who imagine that friendship gives a privilege to licentiousness and ill-behaviour.
12. ‘Friendship is the handmaid of virtue, not a partner in guilt:
13. ‘To the end that virtue, which is powerless to reach the highest objects when it is isolated, might succeed in doing so in partnership with another.
14. ‘Those who enjoy, or have ever enjoyed, such a partnership as this, must be considered to have secured the most excellent and auspicious combination for reaching nature’s highest good.’
Chapter 14
1. ‘Friendship is the partnership which combines moral rectitude with the mutual gift of peace