“One must guard against friendship. How is a friend defined? He is not what philosophy calls the necessary other, but the superfluous third. What are friendship’s ceremonies? You drink each other’s health, you open an artery and mingle your blood with that of the friend. It is difficult to say when the proper moment for this arrives, but it announces itself mysteriously; you feel some way that you can no longer address one another formally. When once you have had this feeling, then it can never appear that you have made a mistake, like Geert Westphaler, who discovered that he had been drinking to friendship with the public hangman.”
————————- ~Source: Either/Or: A Fragment Of Life (1843) Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Victor Eremita
The Kierkegaarden 