There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
Interpretation
True friendship requires trust, and trust is built on honesty and integrity.
This quote emphasizes the fundamental components of a genuine friendship, which are confidence and integrity. It suggests that for a friendship to thrive, both parties must have a foundational trust in each other, and that trust can only be established and maintained through integrity and honesty in their actions and words.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of relationships, one might use this quote to highlight the role of trust.
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
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 the weary pilgrimage.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances.
You have to work hard at staying in contact with your friends so that the relationships will continue and live on... Friendships, along with love, make life worth living.
They might not need me; but they might. I'll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.
it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody
Michael Jackson? He was something more (than one of my favorite entertainers), a true friend. He wasn't just a genius. Above all, he was a good person, who gave so much. He gave people values, he encouraged them to better themselves all the time. He was far deeper and more authentic than people could see. He was misunderstood too many times
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