The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book that should be useful for students interested in psychology, philosophy, sociology, literature, law, and related fields.
How to Be a Friend: An Ancient Guide to True Friendship is by Cicero, a Roman statesman and lawyer who lived over 2000 years ago. He wrote about philosophy and politics, and was a famous speaker and author in his time.
The TU Library collection also includes several other books about different aspects of friendship.
In our era, when a Facebook Friend is someone we never see or communicate with, it is useful to remember that in earlier generations, friendships were taken more seriously.
According to Cicero, real friendship is based on trust, rather than self-interest.
For Cicero, a true friend is one who is, as it were, a second self.
In Rome of his day, some people thought of friends as those who might be useful for fulfilling their own wishes and plans.
Cicero agrees that such friendships are important, can be meaningful, but he finds even more valuable friendships between people who do not look for profit or advantage from each other.
We might consider the people we work with to be friends, or our classmates or neighbors. But beyond these practical friendships are those where we share more important things in common.
Cicero argues that real friendship requires trust, wisdom and basic goodness.
He advises to choose friends carefully, because it can be difficult to end a friendship if it turns out that the friend was not the person we thought.
So it is worth trying to find out what is in a person’s heart before we decide to call them a real friend.
Friends make us better persons, because they appreciate our potential. They will tell us what we need to hear, not what we want them to say.
We should try to listen to our friends and welcome what they have to say, even if we do not like it.
A friend never asks another friend to do something wrong.
Friendship is usually defined as cooperative and supportive behavior between two or more people. It is seen as a supportive relationship involving mutual knowledge and esteem. Some distinguished thinkers and writers, most of them represented by books in the TU Library collection, have expressed themselves in the following ways about friendship:
- What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Aristotle
- Friendship makes prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
Cicero
- We are not born, we do not live for ourselves alone; our country, our friends, have a share in us.
Cicero
- Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
- To let friendship die away by negligence and silence, is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage.
Samuel Johnson
- The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships.
Abraham Lincoln
- A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter;
he who finds one finds a treasure.
A faithful friend is beyond price,
no sum can balance his worth.
Sirach
- Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
William Butler Yeats
- Friends are born, not made.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Ch. VII.
- We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), “19 September 1777”.
- I have loved my friends as I do virtue, my soul, my God.
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1642), Part II, Section V.
- I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people’s lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big.
William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1911).
- The absolute condition for friendship is unity in a life-view. If a person has that, he will not be tempted to base his friendship on obscure feelings or on indefinable sympathies. As a consequence, he will not experience these ridiculous shifts, so that one day he has a friend and the next day he does not. He will not fail to appreciate the significance of the indefinable sympathies, because, strictly speaking, a person is certainly not a friend of everyone with whom he shares a life-view but neither does he stop with only the mysteriousness of the sympathies. A true friendship always requires consciousness and is therefore freed from being infatuation. The life-view in which one is united must be a positive view.
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Part II, Hong p. 319 (1843).
- Why did you do all this for me? he asked. I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you. You have been my friend, replied Charlotte. That in itself is a tremendous thing.
Charlotte’s Web
- Why is it, he said, one time, at the subway entrance, I feel I’ve known you so many years?
Because I like you, she said, and I don’t want anything from you.
Fahrenheit 451
- The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
- The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.
- Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)