My view is that friendship permeates human life and is involved in almost everything we think, feel, and do. For that very reason, there is no behavior that is characteristic of friendship. Two people can engage in the very same behavior - visiting someone in hospital, for example - and yet only one of them might be doing so out of friendship; moreover, friends can be doing absolutely anything together, even quarrel or fight. That means that it is difficult, if not impossible, to recognize a friendship simply on the basis of what people do.

Beauty can be as dangerous as evil can be beautiful. But that is just another aspect of the double edge of non-moral values. Both beauty and friends can be dangerous. If you want to avoid them on these grounds, be my guest. But I wonder what your life will then be like.

In contrast to the values of morality, which depend on and encourage our similarities to each other, values like friendship or beauty depend on and encourage our differences. Ultimately, friendship is essential to our fashioning ourselves in ways that don't simply repeat the fashions of our surroundings: it is a mechanism of individuality.

So long as we find anything beautiful, we feel that we have not yet exhausted what [life] has to offer […] That forward-looking element is … inseparable from the judgment of beauty.

My own view is that friendship is essential to our becoming who we are. It provides a context within which we can, more or less safely, try different ways of being, different approaches to life, and our friends, to whom we open ourselves and by whom we are willing to be influenced and directed, play a central role in what becomes of us.

To find something beautiful is to hope that your life will be better if that is a part of it. Unfortunately, the promise of a better life that beauty makes and the hope that it will be fulfilled are not always realized: beauty, like friendship, is also double-edged.

My view is that friendship permeates human life and is involved in almost everything we think, feel, and do. For that very reason, there is no behavior that is characteristic of friendship. Two people can engage in the very same behavior - visiting someone in hospital, for example - and yet only one of them might be doing so out of friendship; moreover, friends can be doing absolutely anything together, even quarrel or fight. That means that it is difficult, if not impossible, to recognize a friendship simply on the basis of what people do.