"The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay or dislike, hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint and too numerous for removal. Those who are angry may be reconciled, those who have been injured may receive a recompense; but when the desire of pleasing, and willingness to be pleased, is silently diminished, the renovation of friendship is hopeless: as when the vital powers sink into languor, there is no longer any use for the physician."
"... There is such a disaster, so to speak, as having to break off friendship.... In such cases friendships should be allowed to die out gradually by an intermission of intercourse. They should, as I have been told that Cato used to say, rather be unstitched than torn in twain.... For there can be nothing more discreditable than to be at open war with a man with whom you have been intimate.... Our first object then should be to prevent a breach; our second to secure that if it does occur, our friendship should seem to have died a natural rather than a violent death."
"Friends--those relations that one makes for one's self."
"Some one asked Kingsley what was the secret of his strong joyous life; and he answered, 'I had a friend.'"
"The years have taught some sweet, some bitter lessons--none wiser than this: to spend in all things else, but of old friends to be most miserly."
"The best wish for us all is, that when we grow old, as we must do, the fast friends of our age may be those we have loved in our youth."
"Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely love's contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object loved, it desires the dependence of that object upon itself, and its own triumph. Love is the forgetfulness of self; jealousy is the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain _ego_, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself. The contrast is perfect."
"Jealousy is a secret avowal of inferiority."
"We are not jealous of what we give up, but of what is wrested from our unwilling hands. The first is always ours, the second never can be.
"Jealousy is not love, but it is the two-edged sword that parts true love from counterfeit. At its touch, the knowledge of what it is to love without reward, thrills heart and brain, sharp and clear, almost a vision of hell. Then if we are base, we die to love; but if we are noble, it is to ourselves we die.
