Daily Inspiration Quote by Edgar Watson Howe

A “cold, clammy thing to say” is Howe’s way of inoculating the reader against the moral hangover he’s about to induce. Friendship is supposed to be the one social bond that floats above transaction, the warm corner of civic life where we stop keeping score. Howe, an editor by trade and a connoisseur of human motive by necessity, punctures that ideal with newsroom bluntness: the people who treat friendship like “any other selfishness” often do best in the friendship economy.

The line works because it’s not merely cynical; it’s observational. Howe isn’t praising sociopaths so much as describing an incentive structure. If you approach friendship with the same strategic attention you bring to money, status, or career - cultivating access, making yourself useful, pruning ties that don’t pay - you’re likely to accumulate more invitations, more favors, more insulation from loneliness. The “most out of it” is deliberately slippery: more benefits, not more intimacy. He’s separating the social utility of friendship from the ethical story we tell about it.

Context matters. Howe came up in the late-19th-century American press, a world of boosters, patronage, and small-town reputations where connections were currency and sentiment could be weaponized. The subtext is a warning to the earnest: if you assume everyone plays by the Hallmark version of friendship, you’ll be easy to exploit. The sting is that Howe makes you suspect a darker corollary - that even “good” friendships may be partly successful because they contain a little selfishness, just better disguised.