Friendship

Writing and etymology in Korean
(sino-korean)
우정
[ujeong]
友情
Etymology
友 (우) – friend, companion
情 (정) – feeling, sentiment, emotion

One cannot be alone. It is necessary to have a friend and a colleague. People often become friends even if all they have in common is the same particular hobby. When two strangers meet and discover they have the same hometown, they can immediately communicate as if they had known each other for decades.

Be the friend that your friends always feel safe in confiding all their secrets. Someone like that is the very best friend anyone can have. The man who can even temporarily neglect his wife, parents, brothers and sisters, in order to seek out and visit his friend, is an exemplary friend.

Who is a true friend? A true friend lives for their friends; they does not regard them as existing for their benefit. Suppose among ten friends, one of them lived their life for the sake of the other nine. If you ask them, “Who is your best friend?” they will all pick the friend who lived for the others.

A friendship in which a man cries because he wants to see a man will remain as love even after going to heaven.

If you have twenty friends, then who remains as the center of all your friends? If you insist, “All of you should live for my sake!” they will all run away from you. If a person lives for the sake of those friends for ten years, twenty years, until his life ends, even in death; then, if there is a spirit world, everyone will gather around that person. This is an indisputable truth. The person who lives more for others and sacrifices more than others will become the central person.

Beyond the circle of the family, a person seeks friends who will be honest, faithful, and true. The scriptures uphold the ideal of the true friend, while admonishing people to choose their friends carefully, lest they be misled or find themselves abandoned in adversity.

Be a friend to both good and evil people but never become reconciled with evil; rather, act as a magnet to turn such people around to the good side.