The Bums have been friends for so long they have totally forgotten how they became friends, but now that they are approaching the moment when they will have to change tense (this is unavoidable), they often ponder, separately or in unison, this matter of friendship, sometimes in the form of sentences or statements, other times as maxims, or adages, or aphorisms, or proverbs, or pensées, or philosophical propositions, and at other times just words without any form.
We are delighted to be able to present here a dozen of our bums’ reflections on the subject of friendship:
1. Do not become friendly with a person inferior to you.
2. To have too many friends is to have none.
3. Friendship is never profitable.
4. A friend must learn to endure his friend’s successes as well as his failures.
5. Friends are thieves of time.
6. It is more shameful to mistrust a friend than to be betrayed by a friend.
7. Women may go further in matters of love than most men, but men are way ahead in matters of friendship.
8. A friend is someone with whom you want to do something bad.
9. A friend is there to be abused.
10. When a friend pays you a compliment you can be sure it’s bullshit.
11. There are three types of friends: those who love you, those who worry about you, and those who hate you.
12. If a friend can only see with one eye, and as a result wears a patch on the other, always look at him from the good side.