Category: FRIENDSHIP

  • In our lives, nothing is as valuable as friendship. Countless good things may exist, but without friendship, even wealth and luxury lack true benefit. There’s no possession equal to friendship, and nothing worse than being hated.

    —St. John Chrysostom

  • There are compensations for not being in love—solitude grows richer for me every year. It is not a matter of being a recluse … I shall never be that; I enjoy and need my friends too much.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • He and Paul have won through to such a fertile and fertilizing relationship I almost envy it … and then I think of my solitude and realize again that I am truly married to it and without it would be even more nerve-racked and impossible than I am.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • Indeed, when we’re harmed by others, we feel sorrow, but not when we harm ourselves. God demonstrates that those unjustly harmed by others gain renown, while those who harm themselves receive injury. This distinction encourages us to endure external injustices courageously but avoid self-inflicted harm.

    —St. John Chrysostom

  • The love of friends is good, but friends must be loved in God, not for themselves alone, for only God does not perish or change. People look for rest in the physical world and fix their hearts on things that pass away, not moving through them to recognition of the God who made them. True life and true love are found in Christ alone.

    —St. Augustine

  • Friendship can be a dangerous enemy, a seduction of the mind lying beyond the reach of investigation.

    Use careful scrutiny when choosing friends due to the susceptibility to corruption as a result of an unhealthy group of peers.

    —St. Augustine

  • Even good and beautiful things, like the love of friends, can become stumbling blocks if people set them up as substitutes for the God who is their ultimate source. All human loves pass away, and people err in loving friends as substitutes for God, who alone is eternal and unchangeable.

    —St. Augustine

  • The person who just expresses love for his friends but fails to acknowledge their love for him is not a true friend.

    —St. John Chrysostom, On Living Simply

  • Parthenope (2024)
    A24

  • And what was it that I delighted in, but to love, and be loved? but I kept not the measure of love, of mind to mind, friendship’s bright boundary: but out of the muddy concupiscence of the flesh, and the bubblings of youth, mists fumed up which beclouded and overcast my heart, that I could not discern the clear brightness of love from the fog of lustfulness. Both did confusedly boil in me, and hurried my unstayed youth over the precipice of unholy desires, and sunk me in a gulf of flagitiousnesses. Thy wrath had gathered over me, and I knew it not. I was grown deaf by the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of the pride of my soul, and I strayed further from Thee, and Thou lettest me alone, and I was tossed about, and wasted, and dissipated, and I boiled over in my fornications, and Thou heldest Thy peace, O Thou my tardy joy! Thou then heldest Thy peace, and I wandered further and further from Thee, into more and more fruitless seed-plots of sorrows, with a proud dejectedness, and a restless weariness.

    Confessions
    St. Augustine