Help others solve their problems; standing farther away, you can often see matters more clearly than they do. . . The greatest service you can render someone else is helping him or her help themselves.
Baltasar GracianRead
Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.
Interpretation
Friendship enhances the positive aspects of life and mitigates the negative ones.
This quote highlights the dual nature of friendship in human experience. It suggests that having friends not only amplifies the joyous moments we encounter but also helps lessen the burdens and sorrows we face, making life more bearable and enjoyable.
In practice
During a speech at a graduation ceremony, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of lifelong friendships.
Help others solve their problems; standing farther away, you can often see matters more clearly than they do. . . The greatest service you can render someone else is helping him or her help themselves.
It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.
Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than grave teaching.
It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards.
Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others.
The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.
... the friendship of worthless people has a bad effect (because they take part, unstable as they are, in worthless pursuits, and actually become bad through each other's influence). But the friendship of the good is good, and increases in goodness because of their association. They seem even to become better men by exercising their friendship and improving each other; for the traits that they admire in each other get transferred to themselves.
Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.
I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.
The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
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