Life & Wisdom Quote by Randolph Bourne

Friendship gets treated like a renewable resource: always there, self-healing, basically maintenance-free. Bourne refuses that comforting fiction. By calling friendships "fragile things", he drags them out of the sentimental realm and into the material world of breakage, mishandling, and loss. The line is deceptively simple, but it’s doing a quiet rebuke: if you handle your friendships casually, you’re not unlucky when they crack; you’re careless.

The phrase "require as much handling" is the key. Bourne isn’t romanticizing friendship as effortless chemistry; he’s framing it as craft. Handling implies tact, attention to changing conditions, the humility to adjust your grip when the object shifts in your hands. It also suggests that harm is often accidental, not malicious. Most friendships don’t end with a betrayal worthy of a novel; they end with neglected replies, unspoken resentments, the slow accumulation of tiny drops. Bourne’s subtext is that intimacy is less about grand declarations than repeated acts of consideration.

Context sharpens the urgency. Bourne, a young American writer shaped by the early 20th century’s social upheavals and the moral chaos of World War I, watched alliances fracture at every level: nations, movements, circles of intellectuals. He wrote in a moment when ideological purity tests and wartime loyalties could turn friends into enemies overnight. The quote carries that pressure: friendship is "precious" not because it’s cute, but because it’s one of the few human bonds that can survive disagreement - if you treat it like it matters.