Friendship as Love and Friendship as Shared Joy, Social Intercourse, Play, Complicity, Brotherhood

Friendship as Love and Brotherhood and Friendship as Play, Complicity and Shared Joy

We like to place friendship in its highest stage. «Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things of life», says Aristotle, illustrating our penchant to drive friendship to its top and most demanding expressions, where it mimics love.

Friendship may indeed be a form of love and fraternity in the deepest sense of the words. There are many definitions of friendship in these very terms:

A faithful friend is the medicine of life

Bible, Ecclesiastes

Friends cannot lend or give anything to each other. (…) Everything should belong to each of them.
(…)

The union of two such friends being truly perfect, it causes them to lose the sense of such duties, and to detest and banish as between themselves those words implying separation and difference – benefit, obligation, gratitude, entreaty, thanks, and their like.
Montaigne, 1533-1592, French writer, Essays

And yet friendship may also not involve love. Currently, friendship stands at a less demanding stage: the one of conviviality, of social interactivity, of shared joy.

This second view of friendship doesn’t truly diminish it. We need our spaces of conviviality, of play, of joy, of social interaction, as much as we need love. Our nature doesn’t dispense it.

Friendship feeds on communication.
Montaigne, 1533-1592, French writer, Essays

To like and dislike the same things, that is indeed true friendship.
Sallust, 86-35 b.C., Roman historian, Jughurta

To share the happy and sad moments, to confess secrets and intimate projects, all these is a major part of friendship.
A. Rievaulx, 1109-1167, French religious, L'Amitié spirituelle

But that doesn’t alter much our way of seeing things. We persevere seeing friendship as having high standards of brotherhood, complicity and help. And when these last dimensions – very close to love, or mingled with it – fail, we regret it, and consider the very fact as treason:

What is commonly called friendship isn’t but a society, a combination of interests, a change of good intentions; a commerce, where self-interest wants to win something.
Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680, French writer, Maxims

My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend.
E. Kant, 1724-1804, German philosopher, Fundamentos da Filosofia dos costumes

Extreme and delicate friendship can be wounded by a thorn of a rose.
S. Chamfort, 1740-1794, French writer, Maximes et pensées

Eric Blondel, French writer, L'Amour

A true friendship is as rare as a black swan.
E. Kant, 1724-1804, German philosopher, Fundamentos da Filosofia dos costumes

Quotations
It’s good to have friends

Of all the heavenly gifts that mortal men commend,

What trusty treasure in the world can countervail a friend?
N. Grimald, 1519-1562, English poet, Of friendship

It is a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be loved by many friends
Attributed to Euripides, 480-406 b. C., Greek writer

Friendship redoubles joys and cut grieves in halves.

A crowd is not company, faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
F. Bacon, 1561-1626, English philosopher and politician, Essays

Hell is all in the word solitude.
Victor Hugo, 1802-1885, French writer, in E. Morin Method V

What’s friendship can’t do, when guided by love?
Jean Racine, 1639-1699, French poet, Andromaque

The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph W. Emerson, 1803-1882, American writer, Essays

These and similar tokens of friendship, which spring spontaneously from the hearts of those who love and are loved in return - in countenance, tongue, eyes, and a thousand ingratiating gestures - were all so much fuel to melt our souls together, and out of the many made us one.
Saint Augustine, 354-430, Christian theologian, Confessions

Friendship is the path by which each of us learns to know oneself as another self.
Paul Ricœur, 1913, French philosopher, Soi- même comme un autre

The knowing is not only in books, labs or files; it’s also in friendship, and acts through it.
Claude Roy, 1915-1997, French writer, Les rencontres des jours

It is more shameful to distrust one's friends than to be deceived by them.
Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680, French writer, Maximes

Gratitude is the secret of friendship, not because we feel indebted to our friends, since we owe them nothing, but because we share with them an overabundance of common, reciprocal joy.

André Comte-Sponville, French philosopher, A short Treatise on the Great Virtues

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Mark Twain, 1835-1919, American writer, Following the Equator

The best mirror is an old friend.
George Herbert, 1593-1633, English poet, Temple

A brother may not be a friend, but a friend will always be a brother.
Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790, American scientist and politician, Poor Richard's Almanac

True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity, before it is entitled to the appellation.
George Washington, 1732-1799, 1^st American President, Letter Jan. 15, 1783