True friendship is very hard to find or gain; but once achieved it safeguards us against all unpredictable woes. I am trying to subtly analyze and qualify different types and stages in fostering friendship; and ways of preserving it.
It is love that generates the seed of aspirations and the seedling of desires to seek acquaintances, that sprouts as friendship, grows as relationship, buds as intimacy, flowers as a rightful duty, ripens and yields as long standing traditions. Knowledge, virtues, love, friendship, refinement, sociability, community life, sense of shame, honour, true pride, worthiness and sublimity are all links of the same chain, each supports and shines with others. It is the unity of senses that flower earnest friendships. Personal acquaintances or contacts are not essential basis for true friendship.
Friendship is not only for pleasure and play; its moral duty is more to caution and correct faults. There has to be unison in sentiments among friends, physical proximity or intimacy are not its prerequisites. A smile is not always the mark of friendship, whereas sentiment of mind is the real repository of lasting ties. Like the hands clasping a slipping robe by instinct, true friends hastens to relieve distress. It sits high on firm ground, seeping its roots deep, unmindful of adversities. Boasting the nature of self and relationships only mars the purity and sanctity of true friendships.
Evaluate your friends. Courting friendship without evaluation is a bad risk; redemption is scarce once it is held. Nourish companions only after having evaluated temperament, tradition, defects and strains of kinship therein held. Descent from a family of noble traits, shyness to shame are qualities of friendship worth seeking at any price. Condemning to tears, preventing wrong deeds and dinning in wisdom are eligible traits. The scale to measure the depth and width of friendship is the behavior in situation of crisis. There are no better gains to aim than wriggling out from companionship of fools, to save oneself from shame.
Guard against the association of idiots, pretenders in winning smiles and cunning tricks, the devious, aliens to community and social order, whose antecedents have not been probed properly, who desert in distress, incompatible in character, lacking manners, who befriends for profit, unfaithful, spoilers of harm and those who do not stick to norms.
