"[W]e shall be constantly detecting our need, not of a friend to commend and extol us, but of a friend to take us to task, to be frank with us, and indeed to blame us when our conduct is bad. For there are few among us who have the courage to show frankness rather than favor . . . and this is the province of the true friend . . . I have no use of a friend that shifts about just as I do and nods assent just as I do (for my shadow better performs that function) but I want one that tells the truth as I do, and decides for himself as I do." --Plutarch, How To Tell A Friend From A Flatterer.

"Thus the friendship of inferior people is evil, for they take part together in inferior pursuits and by becoming like each other are made positively evil. But the friendship of the good is good and grows with their intercourse. And they actually seem to become better by putting their friendship into practice and because they correct each other's faults . . . " --Aristotle, Ethics.

". . . that which most especially cements a friendship begun is a likeness of pursuits and characters, and since to take delight in the same things and avoid the same things is what generally brings people together in the first place, and gets them acquainted through the bond of sympathy, the flatterer takes note of this fact, and adjusts and shapes himself . . ." --Plutarch, How to Tell a Friend from a Flatterer

"Well then, Gorgias, [public speaking] it seems to me is not an art, but the occupation of a shrewd and enterprising spirit, and one naturally skilled in dealings with men, and in sum and substance I call it a type of 'flattery' . . . because it aims at what is gratifying, ignoring the good . And I insist that it is not an art . . . because I refuse the name of art to anything irrational." --Socrates, in Plato's Gorgias

". . . better to fall in with crows than flatterers, for in the one case you are devoured when dead, in the other while still alive." Diogenes Laertius, Antisthenes.

 "A letter from A., who refers to my beauty, my boyishness, and my lucidity. I snap at this bait so greedily that I cannot see my foolishness. I try to imagine the cynicism that would have evolved had I, at twenty-four, flattered my elders."--John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever.

"When I look back on my past life, it seems as if you, a man of foreign speech, whom I have never seen, and alas, perhaps never shall see, had been my chief Benefactor; nay, I may say the only real Benefactor I ever met with; inasmuch as wisdom is the only real good, the only blessing which cannot be perverted, which blesses both him that gives and him that takes. In trying bereavements, when old friends are snatched away from you, it must be a consolation to think that neither in this age, nor in any other can you ever be left alone; but that wherever men seek the Truth, spiritual clearness and Beauty, there you have brothers and children." Thomas Carlyle, letter to Goethe.

". . . the aim and end of both the speech in the mind and the speech in utterance is friendship, towards oneself and towards one's neighbor respectively; for the former, ending through philosophy in virtue, makes a man harmonious with himself, free from blame from himself, and full of peace and friendliness with himself."--Plutarch, Old Men in Public Affairs.

"One who with the girdle of Venus kept men at a distance would seem out of sympathy with Venus; and a man who irritates others by what he says and sets them against him is out of sympathy with the Muses and knows not how to use them, seeing that speech was invented for the purpose of winnning men's good will." --Erasmus, Parallels

"I am never happier than when I am performing good offices for good people; and the most friendly office one can perform is to make worthy characters acquainted with one another. The good things of this life are scattered so sparingly in our way that we must glean them up as we go." Thomas Jefferson letter to Abigail Adams

"In the evenings my parents went occasionally to the theater, but never, as far as I remember, to a concert, or any kind of musical performance, until the Opera, then only sporadic, became an established entertainment, to which one went (as in eighteenth century Italy) chiefly if not solely for the pleasure of conversing with one's friends." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward

--Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

"Dear Louis-- Let me call you that in the hope of softening a little the light with which you burn too bright for these old eyes. You mustn't be so intellectual with me . . . . We shan't mean anything too profoundly except perhaps that we are friends and that nothing else matters between friends. That is the only sincerity; all else is approximation. It sounds like the loss of something, and it is -- of competition, of the sharpening of wits and of the criticisms that makes us look to ourselves. But friendship is like that: it may not be as strengthening as enmity, and then again it may. At any rate it is different. The beauty of enmity is in insecurity; the beauty of friendship is in security." --Robert Frost, letter to Louis Untermeyer, 9 September 1915.

 "You must not think that I have forgotten you: friends who are also poets are never forgotten: memory keeps them in rose-leaves: But Life-- colored, turbulent Life-- rushes like a river between oneself and those whom one likes, too often."--Oscar Wilde, letter to G.H. Kersley.

"That is what I think true friendship should be, like that men could make their lives: but friendship is a fire where what is not flawless shrinks into grey ashes, and where what is imperfect is not purified but consumed. There may be much about which we differ, you and I, more perhaps than we fancy, but in our desire for beauty in all things we are open, and one in our search for that little city of gold where the flute-player never wearies, and the spring never fades, and the oracle is not silent, that little city which is the house of art, and where, with all the Music of the Spheres, and the laughter of the gods, Art waits for her worshippers." --Oscar Wilde, letter to R. H. Sherard.

"Dear Matt-- Why the d[evi]l I sh[ou]ld write to you he only knows who implanted the spirit of disinterested attention in the spaniel . . . our orbits therefore early in August might perhaps cross, and we two serene undeviating stars salute each other once again for a moment amid the infinite spaces . . " --Matthew Arnold, letter to Arthur Hugh Clough, June 23, 1849.

"I determine however to write from a conviction that truth, between candid minds, can never do harm. . . . That you and I differ in our ideas as to the best form of government is well known to us both: but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each others motives, and confining our difference of opinion to private conversation. . . . I never did in my life, either by myself or any other, have a sentence of mine inserted in a newspaper without putting my name to it; and I believe I never shall." Jefferson, letter to John Adams.

[Flaming was] "a rigorous, sometimes cruel, but usually earnest effort to search out truth and blast away cant and obfuscation without worrying too much about how one ought to behave. How would it be to live that way? To let your thought-dreams be seen? To say to your fellow citizens, Let's not allow social conventions to determine the way we speak to each other; let's just say what we think." John Seabrook, from Deeper--My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace [But it doesn't work. Seabroook rediscovered online the need to communicate with restraint, courtesy and kindness and even insincerity, flattery and hypocrisy.] 

--Christopher Morley

"Many a friendship, too, has been parted and many an oath broken through belief in slander. . . .It is characteristic of good men to win renown and gain a reputation for kind-heartedness by doing good to their friends, not by accusing others wrongfully and getting them hated. [To guard against slander] [s]et Reason as a strict doorkeeper over all that is said, to welcome and admit what deserves it, but shut out and drive off what is bad. For surely it would be ridiculous to have doorkeepers to guard your house, but to leave your ears and your mind open." --Lucian, Slander

"Being told that Plato was abusing him, he said: "it is a royal privilege to do good and be ill spoken of." Diogenes Laertius, Antisthenes.

"The enemies of Fabius thought they had sufficiently humiliated and subdued him by raising Minucius to be his equal in authority. But they mistook the temper of the man . . . . Like Diogenes, who, being told that some persons derided him, answered 'But I am not derided' meaning that only those were really insulted on whom such insults made an impression-- so Fabius with great tranquility and unconcern, submitted to what happened. And so he contributed a proof to the argument of the philosophers that a just and good man is not capable of being dishonored." 'Fabius,' in Plutarch's Lives

"It is a just and not a new observation that enemies to particular persons, and opponents to particular measures, seldom confine their censures to such things only, in either, as are worthy of blame."Publius (John Jay), Federalist No. 64.

Attacking the gays was wrong, wrong, wrong. Besides they vote too." Richard M. Nixon

"The Almighty, who gave the dog to be the companion of our pleasures and of our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit. He forgets neither friend nor foe; remembers, and with accuracy, both benefit and injury. He hath a share of man's intelligence, but no share of man's falsehood. You may bribe an assassin to slay a man; or a witness to take his life by false accusation, but you cannot make a dog tear his benefactor. He is the friend of man save when man justly incurs his enmity." --Sir Walter Scott.

"The one absolutely unselfish friend a man may have in this selfish world, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is the dog. A man's dog stands by him in prosperity and poverty, in health and in sickness. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer, he will lick the sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He will sleep on the cold ground when the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master's side. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. If fortune drives the master forth an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him, to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies, and when the last scene of all comes, and death takes his master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there, by his graveside, will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, and his eyes sad, but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true, even unto death." -- Senator Vest

--Rudyard Kipling