Life & Wisdom Quote by Eustace Budgell

Friendship, Budgell suggests, is not a warm blur of good intentions but a structure with load-bearing beams. “Love and esteem” aren’t decorative add-ons; they’re the twin conditions that keep the whole relationship from collapsing into something else entirely: dependency, convenience, flattery, habit. The sentence is clipped and almost legalistic, the language of “first principles” and “imperfect” insisting that affection alone doesn’t qualify. You can love someone and still think poorly of them; that’s family territory, or romance gone sideways, or the sort of bond that survives on pity. You can esteem someone without loving them; that’s a professional alliance, a mentor-mentee dynamic, a polite distance mistaken for intimacy.

Budgell writes out of an early 18th-century world that prized reputation, manners, and moral standing as social currency. “Esteem” isn’t just admiration; it’s a judgment about character, the public-facing measure of whether someone is worth attaching your name to. Friendship here is quietly political: who you choose signals who you are. At the same time, “love” keeps esteem from curdling into mere evaluation, the chilly stance of a spectator grading a life.

The subtext is an argument against the era’s social theater. Budgell is drawing a line between friendship and the transactional relationships of salons, patronage, and status-chasing. If either pillar is missing, you may still have companionship, loyalty, even intimacy, but you don’t have the thing he’s defending: a bond that is both emotionally committed and morally convinced.