In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself.
That is why pathetic people who simply "want friends" can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends.
Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?—Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?" The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things.
A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logically disproved, but it tells us a good deal about those who hold it.
We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have terminated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on matters which the children understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously—sometimes of their religion—insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question "Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?
"If you would be loved, be lovable" —Ovid
In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciat, the people who "happen to be there." Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves offer than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.
The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.