It is easy to mistake strangers for friends
It is easy to mistake strangers for friends. You may think you know scores of people from the bars or the gym, but they are really no more than acquaintances familiar from a common locale. A moment’s reflection shows how little of substance each really knows about the other.
The company you keep can work wonders. With friends you feel that you belong and are a part, whereas you feel apart with the merely familiar because they offer no company to keep. People who unfailingly notify you of their latest life dramas and solicit favors while never reciprocating or supporting your own happiness are not friends but public nuisances.
Your example
We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we do them.
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Civility and politeness essentially consist, if I am not deceived, in a kind way of dealing and conversing with others ...
[Oprah Winfrey said in one of the interview she was giving :]
"There’s a wonderful phrase by Maya Angelou, from a poem that she wrote called “To our grandmothers”, that she says:
“I come as one, but I stand as ten thousand.”
So when I walk into a room, particularly before I have something really challenging to do, or I’m going to be in a circumstance where I feel I’m going to be you know, up against some difficulties. I will literally sit, and I will call on the 10,000."
Note : the actual phrase in the poem is : "I go forth along, and stand as ten thousand."