Success Quote by Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau is warning against a quiet kind of narcissism that masquerades as affection: the habit of treating a friend as a personal asset rather than a full human being. The phrasing is pointed. “Danger” suggests not a harmless misunderstanding but a moral and perceptual failure. And “absolutely” is classic Thoreau: a bid for clear seeing, for encountering a person as she is in herself, not as a reflection of our needs.

The sentence hinges on a contrast between “absolutely” and “to us alone.” Friendship, in this view, becomes ethically compromised the moment it shrinks into private utility. You can hear the critique of sentimental ownership: the friend as confidante, as validator, as mirror, as emotional infrastructure. Thoreau doesn’t deny that friends matter to us; he’s suspicious of the way “considering” can become a kind of annexation, where our attention is really self-attention wearing a human face.

Context matters. Thoreau’s transcendentalist milieu prized the sovereignty of the individual soul and the discipline of perception. He wrote as someone wary of social forms that dilute truth into comfort. The gendered “she” also nudges the line away from abstract camaraderie and into lived relationships, where projection is easiest and most culturally encouraged.

What makes the line work is its humility disguised as severity: it asks for a friendship tough enough to withstand otherness. Not intimacy that collapses distance, but intimacy that preserves it.