Friendship

by

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Friendship makes teaching easy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Character Analysis

In “Friendship,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in the first person, imbuing the essay with his own personal views and advice for the reader. Emerson was a well-known preacher, orator, and writer, as well as the leader of a group of New England intellectuals who became known as the Transcendentalists. Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists (most notably Henry David Thoreau) disdained what they saw as the superficial distractions of society, preferring the quiet, reflective solitude they found in nature and in their studies. Yet, as “Friendship” makes clear, Emerson also hungered for authentic human connection, and, somewhat paradoxically, saw in every social interaction the potential to encounter a great soul. Although he regarded most gatherings as a waste of time, Emerson prized the deep communion of souls possible in conversation and dialogue, whether in person or in the written forms of the letter and essay (a genre of writing that, like a letter, can be written as a conversation with an active reader). In “Friendship,” Emerson acknowledges that it is impossible to ever really acknowledge another person as a true individual—one cannot conceive of others as being as fully independent, autonomous, or unpredictable as oneself. He also grants that a friend is partially constructed through one’s imagination. This is why a friend must be kept at some distance, so that intimate personal knowledge does not deflate one’s ideal picture of the friend, or allow one to feel so comfortable with a friend as to forget that he or she is in fact independent, and not just a familiar part of one’s world. Although Emerson famously argues in “Self-Reliance” and other works that real life is lived in solitude and utter independence, he is hopeful throughout “Friendship,” and particularly at its conclusion, that true friendship can dignify each friend, and help one access eternal truths even in the mundane activities and experiences of daily experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes in Friendship

The Friendship quotes below are all either spoken by Ralph Waldo Emerson or refer to Ralph Waldo Emerson. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
True Friendship Theme Icon
).
Friendship Quotes

A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kingliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,—
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the mill-round of our fate
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them divides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many, one.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:

I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity,—thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,—thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen....Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worse, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and the gifted!

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker)
Page Number: 42-3
Explanation and Analysis:

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none about it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give, and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Related Symbols: The Gemstone
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and gables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Friendship LitChart as a printable PDF.
Friendship PDF

Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes in Friendship

The Friendship quotes below are all either spoken by Ralph Waldo Emerson or refer to Ralph Waldo Emerson. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
True Friendship Theme Icon
).
Friendship Quotes

A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kingliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,—
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the mill-round of our fate
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them divides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many, one.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:

I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity,—thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,—thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen....Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worse, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and the gifted!

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker)
Page Number: 42-3
Explanation and Analysis:

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none about it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give, and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Related Symbols: The Gemstone
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and gables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.

Related Characters: Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaker), The Friend
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis: