Topic

Familiarity

Familiarity in this collection is what survives the stripping away of performance. Washington on being courteous to all but intimate with few is the social calibration: intimacy is a resource to be invested carefully, not a default to be extended indiscriminately. Mansfield on the blessing of friendship being that you need not explain yourself is the most precise account of what familiarity actually provides: the relief of being known without requiring translation. Emerson on the blessing of being stupid with old friends is the democratic extension: the highest form of comfort is the freedom to be unremarkable in good company. Yeats on glory-consisting-in-such-friends gives familiarity its most elevated register: identity is constituted by the quality of those who know you. Aquinas on nothing-on-earth-more-prized-than-true-friendship is the theological summary. Beecher on the mother's heart as the child's schoolroom closes with familiarity at its most formative: the most consequential teaching is done in intimate relationship, before either teacher or student knows it is happening.

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Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud

Source: The Spectator, no. 225 (1711)

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them

Think where mans glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship

You should trust any man in his own art provided he is skilled in it.

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face

Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object

When a man becomes familiar with his goddess, she quickly sinks into a woman

Married couples who love each other tell each other a thousand things without talking.

The comfort of having a friend may be taken away, but not that of having had one

Friendships are discovered rather than made.

You know full well as I do the value of sisters' affections: There is nothing like it in this world

It's the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected

There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence

The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom

The greatest sweetener of human life is friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.

There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself - an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly

I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred - that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt