Daily Inspiration Quote by Saint Francis de Sales

Friendship, in Saint Francis de Sales's telling, isn't a pleasant accessory to the spiritual life; it's part of the architecture. "Taken up again" reads like a quiet rebuke to the era's habitual brutality: plague, war, and childbirth could erase a household overnight. In that world, relationships were constantly being "broken off" by forces no one could bargain with. He answers that instability with a promise of continuity, not as sentimentality but as doctrine: what is formed in charity doesn't expire when the body does.

The phrasing does careful theological work. "Begun in this world" makes friendship both ordinary and testable. It's not a mystical bond reserved for saints; it starts in kitchens, letters, shared labor, small acts of patience. Yet it also implies a sorting. Only certain friendships qualify for eternity: those rooted in virtue rather than utility, gossip, or appetite. De Sales was famous for practical spirituality aimed at laypeople, and this line fits his project: sanctify daily life by treating human attachment as a training ground for heaven.

The subtext is a gentle moral audit. If you believe friendships are eternal, you stop treating people as disposable, stop nurturing relationships that depend on status or novelty, stop allowing resentment to be your last word. There's also consolation with an edge: grief is real, but it isn't final; reconciliation matters because you may be living with the outcome forever. The promise lands because it dignifies intimacy without romanticizing it, turning friendship from a temporary comfort into a lifelong, then life-after-life, responsibility.