The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [42]
18. ‘It is no less true that there can be nothing more subversive of friendship than flattery, adulation and base compliance.
19. ‘I use as many terms as possible to brand this vice of light-minded, untrustworthy people, whose sole object is to please without regard to truth.
20. ‘In everything false pretence is bad, for it negates our power of discerning the truth.
21. ‘But to nothing is it so hostile as friendship; for it destroys that frankness without which friendship is an empty name.
22. ‘For if the essence of friendship lies in the closeness of two minds, how can friendship exist if the two minds are in reality at variance?
23. ‘Fannius, if we take reasonable care it is as easy to distinguish a genuine from a specious friend
24. ‘As it is to distinguish what is coloured and artificial from what is sincere and genuine.
25. ‘Fewer people are endowed with virtue than wish to be thought to be so. It is such people that take delight in flattery.
26. ‘When they are flattered they take it as testimony to the truth of their own self-praises.
27. ‘It is not then properly friendship at all when the one will not listen to the truth, and the other is prepared to lie.’
Chapter 16
1. ‘And so I repeat: it is virtue, virtue, which both creates and preserves friendship.
2. ‘On it depends harmony of interest, permanence, fidelity.
3. ‘When virtue has shewn the light of her countenance, and recognised the same light in another,
4. ‘She gravitates towards it, and in turn welcomes what the other has to show;
5. ‘And from it springs up a flame which you may call either love or friendship. Both words are from the same root;
6. ‘And love is just the cleaving to one whom you love without the prompting of need or any view to advantage,
7. ‘Though advantage blossoms spontaneously in friendship, little as you may have looked for it.
8. ‘It is with such warmth of feeling, Fannius, that I cherished my friends. For it was their virtue that I loved, and even death has not taken that love away.
9. ‘I declare that of all the blessings which either fortune or nature has bestowed upon me, I know none to compare with friendship.
10. ‘In it I found sympathy in public business, counsel in private business; in it too I found a means of spending my leisure with unalloyed delight.
11. ‘Why speak of the eagerness with which I and my friends always sought to learn something new,
12. ‘Spending our leisure hours in the quest for knowledge, far from the gaze of the world?
13. ‘If the recollection and memory of these things had perished with my friends, I could not possibly endure the regret for those so closely united with me in life and affection.
14. ‘But these things have not perished; they are rather fed and strengthened by reflection and memory.
15. ‘This is everything I have to say on friendship. One piece of advice on parting; make up your minds to this:
16. ‘To seek the good is the first demand we should make upon ourselves;
17. ‘But next to the good, and to it alone, the greatest of all things is friendship.’
Lamentations
Chapter 1
1. When I was without comfort, and sorrowing; when the grief of life was present to me, and afflictions common to man were upon me, then I lamented, and said:
2. We are born to suffer and die, and the days of our laughter are few in the land.
3. Every joy we foresee has its cost in the loss that must follow, for nothing survives its hour, and the first to fade is the season of pleasantness.
4. To love is to contract for sorrow, since one of two must depart first, and affections diminish and vanish.
5. To love what is made of nature is to love what changes and passes; and yet we must love, and so we must suffer.
6. Likewise to strive is to fail; even the taste of victory grows rank in the mouth, and success is fleeting;
7. And yet we must strive, for what is man if he does not strive; and so we must suffer.
8. To make and hold anything of value is to give hostages to the thieves of time, who owe us nothing in return but the promise to steal us too.
9. At