Though this is the most important thing in life, it is the one least cared for... Few are the friends of a man's self, most those of his circumstances... The insight of a true friend is more useful than the goodwill of others: therefore gain them by choice, not by chance.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The uncomfortable sorting in this maxim is between friends of your circumstances and friends of yourself. The first group likes your post, your access, your usefulness, and it evaporates the day those change; the second is rare, survives your decline, and is the only kind worth building a life around. The instruction is to choose deliberately, the way you would any decision that shapes decades, rather than letting friendship accrete by proximity and habit. The test is not who is pleasant company. It is who tells you the true thing you do not want to hear, and who would still take your call in the year everything goes wrong.
Practice
- Sort your circle honestly once: who is here for what you provide, and who would remain if it vanished? The answer reorders your calendar.
- Invest most in the few friends of yourself, and hold the circumstance-friends lightly, without resentment; they are fine for what they are.
- Prize the friend who corrects you; usefulness in friendship is insight, not applause (maxim 147 keeps that channel open).
Use this when
- Use this at every life transition, when circumstance-friends fall away and you learn who the real ones were.
- Use it building the second half of life; the friendships that will carry your old age are chosen now, by deposit (maxim 111 makes them one at a time).
Ignore this when
- Don't demand every relationship be deep; pleasant acquaintance is a real good, provided you do not mistake it for the other thing.
- Don't test friends cynically for loyalty; selection is by observation over time, not by trap.
A picture of it
In the first still month after retiring, a senior manager watches the traffic sort itself: the daily callers who wanted approvals go silent, and a much smaller group remains, three people who had never needed anything from the office in the first place. He is briefly wounded, then grateful, because the sorting was accurate and free. The friends of his chair left with the chair. The friends of him stayed, and it turns out he had chosen exactly those three, years earlier, without quite knowing he was choosing.
Circumstance sends most of your friends. Choose the few who came for you, before the circumstance changes and does the choosing for you.