120 philosophical essays you must read in your life

Chapter 93

Chapter 5, Section 14, On Friendship

[Lebanon] Gibran
A young man said: Please tell us about friendship.

He replied:

Your friends are your responsive needs.

He is the field you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.

He is your food and drink and your furnace.

Because you run to him hungering and thirsting, you look to him for peace.

When your friend confides in you, don't be afraid to say the "no" in your heart, and don't hide the "yes" in your heart.

When he is silent, still your heart will hear his heart.

For in friendship without words, all thoughts, all desires, all hopes are born and shared with silent joy.

When you part from your friends, don't be sad.

For what you love most about him becomes clearer in his absence, as a climber's view of the mountain from the plain is clearer.

Let friendship have no purpose other than to seek the deepening of the soul.

For that love which seeks only to reveal its own mystery is not love, but a net cast and caught only the useless.

Give your best and most beautiful things to your friends.

If he must know the ebb and flow of your tide, let him also know the ebb and flow of your tide.

Can a person whom you seek only to pass the time count as your friend?

You are going to find him in the time of growth.

Because His time is to meet your needs, not to fill your emptiness.

In the tenderness of friendship, let there be laughter and shared joy.

For in the nectar of little things your heart finds his friendship and refreshes itself.

【Together with you】

Love is the moonlight in the bedroom, friendship is the sunshine on the earth.

People without friendship are like seedlings lacking the nourishment of rain and dew.So cherish friendship as you cherish your own eyes.This is also because it is so difficult to get friendship.If you don't know how to cherish friendship, you don't know life.

Life can be lively or lonely - when you rest on the chest of an old friend or two, life can be lonely or lively - when you are laughing among a large group of new friends, lively and Loneliness has reason and taste, and thus constitutes a colorful life that is constantly enriched, constantly improved, and constantly upward.

There is no better thing in the world than a few serious friends who are just in mind and heart.Einstein said so.

Because a friend is another self.

(End of this chapter)