A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.
Genuine
Yes. In Essays: First Series (1841), Essay VI, “Friendship”.
Found word for word by program in the full text.
- Work
- Essays: First Series (Essays), 1841
- Where
- Essay VI, “Friendship”
- Found at
- Paragraph 276 of the text
Researched by AI; checked by program against the full text on 31 October 2026. Editorial review: pending. How we check
On the page
The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.
[…] He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. […]
The other element of friendship is tenderness. […]
Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired), that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. […]
The scene
Emerson names the two elements of friendship; this is the first, truth, the other being tenderness. He says that with a real friend one can drop the courtesy, compliment and second thought which people never take off in company, and that alone we are sincere but at the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins.
What it means
A friend is someone in whose company you can say what you really think without performing.
Topics
Related quotes
- The only way to have a friend is to be one.
- Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself...” C. S. Lewis
- The language of friendship is not words but meanings. Henry David Thoreau
- To love at all is to be vulnerable. C. S. Lewis
- A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you. (misattributed) Elbert Hubbard
Cite it
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series (1841), Essay VI, “Friendship”. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/a-friend-is-a-person-with-whom-i-may-be-sincere/ (31 October 2026).
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