Summary: Friendships are essential for our emotional well-being and help us feel connected. They require forgiveness and understanding, allowing us to support each other through life’s challenges. True friendships make us better people and enrich all our relationships.
good friendships matter greatly to our welfare. (View Highlight)
We have an inner need to belong and connect. Relationships are the bedrock of our emotional well-being. No matter how strong we feel, we need relationships that nurture and sustain our strength throughout our lives. (View Highlight)
the key to healthy ageing is relationships, relationships, relationships.” (View Highlight)
the cornerstone of a rich friendship is forgiveness and mercy. Friends stand tall and close to each other, especially during each other’s vulnerabilities, being present and forgiving to each other no matter the circumstances. (View Highlight)
“Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion that we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.” (View Highlight)
Friendship is a lens through which we see the goodness and future possibilities—the best self in others as they do likewise. (View Highlight)
“In the course of the years, a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves. To remain friends, we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves. Through the eyes of a real friendship, an individual is larger than their everyday actions, and through the eyes of another, we receive a greater sense of our own personhood, one we can aspire to, the one in whom they have most faith. Friendship is a moving frontier of understanding not only of the self and the other but also, of a possible and as yet unlived, future.” (View Highlight)
Without friendship, our relationships are doomed to fail. (View Highlight)
“Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationship: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship. The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.” (View Highlight)
Even in death, a good friendship continues. Past conversations and memories remain like guideposts to us. We talk to them as if talking to ourselves. They stay somewhere in the ether, checking in on our lives. (View Highlight)
“No matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.” (View Highlight)