Friendship

by

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Throughout “Friendship,” Emerson speaks of an ideal friend, someone with whom a true connection may be established. This friend carries within him or her some aspect of the “Deity” that Emerson feels he also carries, and when the two meet, these two instances of the “Deity” recognize one another. One may find the ideal friend in any sort of person, in any station, at any time. Therefore the ideal friend cannot be made, only met, and the friendship that develops unfolds organically, independent of the will of either person. This means not only that friendship often takes longer to develop than one may like, but also that friends may come and go, just like leaves, which grow and then fall away. Emerson grants that, just as one always only ever knows an appearance of the world, rather than the world itself, one never makes direct contact with another person, just with one’s subjective impression of that person. Accordingly, one’s friend is at least in part an idealized construction. This is one reason why the friend must always be appreciated at a distance, the way one appreciates the luster of a gemstone. Friends must never become too intimate, for this intimate knowledge is a kind of distraction, Emerson writes, from the true activity of friends, which is communion of souls in conversation, a kind of unrestricted flowing together of souls that occurs in one-on-one written or spoken dialogue. That is to say, the true friend is someone with whom one can act as if one were alone.

The Friend Quotes in Friendship

The Friendship quotes below are all either spoken by The Friend or refer to The Friend. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
True Friendship Theme Icon
).
Friendship Quotes

A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kingliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,—
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the mill-round of our fate
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them divides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many, one.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:

I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity,—thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,—thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none about it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give, and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Related Symbols: The Gemstone
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and gables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Friendship LitChart as a printable PDF.
Friendship PDF

The Friend Character Timeline in Friendship

The timeline below shows where the character The Friend appears in Friendship. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Friendship
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...the “lover rooted stays.” The speaker, using the first person, says that he thought his friend had gone, but in reality the “kindliness” remained “unexhausted”. The effect of rediscovering this kindness... (full context)
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...in isolation, is only able to begin writing when he writes a letter to a friend. The act of writing the letter brings forth thoughts and ways of expressing them. Emerson... (full context)
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...a thousand years of solitude, Emerson says, if it knew that it would rejoin its friend someday. (full context)
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Emerson tells the reader that he “awoke this morning” with gratitude for his friends. This is a cause for thanking God, who presents these “gifts” to Emerson. In general,... (full context)
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Emerson has found his friends through chance. God gave them, he writes. The “Deity” in Emerson finds the Deity in... (full context)
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...that he loses sleep. He has often been mistaken about who will actually become  a friend, getting worked up about a relationship that “yields no fruit” in the form of thought... (full context)
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But friendship, like the heart, has expansions and compressions. Even though Emerson feels so strongly about his... (full context)
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Emerson asks whether, through considering the way in which friends are partially constructed, he should be afraid of undermining the “metaphysical foundation of this Elysian... (full context)
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...of that.”  The other has come recently and will soon depart. Emerson suggests that a friend should be thought of as a leaf that grows from the tree that is his... (full context)
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Hence, everyone spends his or her life in search of friendship. Emerson writes a fictional letter that might be addressed to a potential friend, in which... (full context)
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Humans tend to search for the “petty benefit” and “sudden sweetness” of an easy friendship, picking “the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God.” Most people search for friends... (full context)
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Emerson states that he should be able to be open to any real friendship, no matter how many friends he already has. He will be unable to be happy... (full context)
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The importance of being “equal” to all of one’s friends justifies “bashfulness and apathy,” which act as a “tough husk” against the “premature ripening” that... (full context)
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True friendships should not be treated “daintily, but with roughest courage” because they are the “solidest thing”... (full context)
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Emerson states that there are two equally important elements in friendship. The first is truth: a friend is a person with whom one can be “sincere,”... (full context)
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...false age” like the present. One must adapt one’s behavior to suit almost everyone. A friend, however, is a “sane man” who “exercises not my ingenuity, but me.”  A friend is... (full context)
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The second element necessary for true friendship is “tenderness,” a sentiment much rarer than the normal admiration, fear, pride, hope, hatred, lust,... (full context)
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True friendship is uncommon because it requires “natures so rare and costly,” perfectly suited for one another.... (full context)
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...called upon, is like a sundial in the shade. In the sunlight that radiates from friends, the person will become eloquent once again.     (full context)
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Friendship requires a “rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness” of the people involved. Emerson does not... (full context)
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Friendship requires a “magnanimous” person who lets nature take its course and does not meddle with... (full context)
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The “guild” of true friendship takes time to join. Personal relations with a friend should not be “rash.” There is... (full context)
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...are not visible when the eye is too close, so do the qualities of a friend require a bit of distance to be apparent. This is why letters are so meaningful,... (full context)
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...be our own before we can be another’s,” so that one can speak to a friend as a self-possessed equal. In a friendship, each individual must be entirely independent and equal,... (full context)
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Emerson urges the reader to have “grandeur of spirit” when it comes to friendship, not saying anything to “select souls” that is foolish or thoughtless. One should “wait, and... (full context)
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Emerson acknowledges that, the higher one’s expectations for friendship, the more difficult it is to actually find it in the real world. Friends are... (full context)
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...this mendicancy,” forswearing this search for self in others. One should even part with one’s friends, in order to meet with them again on a higher level. A friend is therefore... (full context)
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Emerson treats his friends like his books: he knows where they are but does not often “use” them. One... (full context)
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Emerson remarks that it seems possible for a friendship to be largely one-sided. Like the sun, he can radiate his friendship without all of... (full context)
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But, Emerson writes, one cannot reflect on friendship as he has been doing without “a sort of treachery to the relation.” For, in... (full context)