One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.
Interpretation
True friendship transcends time and distance, influencing lives profoundly.
This quote emphasizes the idea that the quality of friendship is not solely determined by the amount of time spent together. Rather, significant moments can have a profound impact on our lives, regardless of how much time we have known someone, while long-term relationships may not always lead to personal growth or change.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of relationships, you could quote this to highlight how deep connections can form in brief encounters.
People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.
An enemy to whom you show kindness becomes your friend, excepting lust, the indulgence of which increases its enmity.
Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.
As long as you are lucky, you will have many friends; if cloudy times appear, you will be alone. -Donec eris felix, multos numerabis amicos; tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris
A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams.
Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend.
Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
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