HKB
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Often appears with: reverence · friendship and loyalty · friendship · friend selection · duty, conscience, and obligation
Usually: reflection (1) · exhortation (1)
“Friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays — First Series · precept
Emerson argues that true friendship requires reverent distance, magnanimity, spiritual treatment, and long probation, discouraging possessiveness and close personal intrusion while praising spiritual correspondence through letters.
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. He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ag…