Slow but steady wins the race.
AesopRead
The quarrels of friends are the opportunities of foes.
Interpretation
Disagreements between friends can create advantages for their enemies.
This quote by Aesop suggests that conflicts among friends not only reveal the strength of their bonds but also highlight the vulnerabilities that can be exploited by their adversaries. It serves as a reminder that while friends may experience disagreements, these moments can be seized by those who wish to create division or take advantage of any cracks in the relationship.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of maintaining friendships, one might use this quote to illustrate how misunderstandings can lead to vulnerabilities.
Slow but steady wins the race.
We often despise what is most useful to us.
The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own Lures. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
If you are a friend, why do you bite me so hard? If an enemy, why do you fawn on me?
The unhappy derive comfort from the misfortunes of others.
We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.
That is the happiest conversation where there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm, quiet interchange of sentiments...
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