The great risk in the self-help approach to life is that the description of wellbeing becomes prescription. So, when it comes to friendship, friendship ceases to be valued for the happiness of belonging to others; instead friends themselves must become service providers - friends for this, friends for that. If they aren't fit for purpose, they must be ditched and replaced by a friend who is.

Lesley Thomas has a very funny, and I think incisive, piece in the Telegraph today, exploring this reality, as she sees it today. And there are 'frenemies' - enemies with whom you are pally (often in the workplace).

Her conclusion: what a strange world it is when we collect online acquaintances with abandon and call them friends, whilst 'defriending' the individuals with whom we share our real lives.

The first, an Arabian proverb, is of the inspirational kind: 'A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.'

The second, an observation of Stephen Fry, is of the arresting kind: If you have genital warts, your friend is the last person you show them to. You go to see a complete stranger, a doctor. If you have the psychological equivalent, like depression, you do not want your friends to see it either. Another stranger is better, a therapist. So the idea that friends are always the people you want to see in times of trouble is, I think, not right.

The third is a masterpiece in the witty and profound wisdom of Slavoj Žižek: 'When, after being engaged in a fierce competition for a job promotion with my closest friend, I happen to win, the proper thing to do is to offer to withdraw, so that he will get the promotion, and the proper thing for him to do is to reject my offer - this way, perhaps, our friendship can be saved.'

Shakespeare's thought that 'most friendship is feigning' seems to be a good summary of his approach to amity: this collection of other comments appears to support the surmise.

'Keep thy friend Under thy own life's key.' All's Well That Ends Well 1.1.65-6, Countess to Bertram

'Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.' Hamlet 1.3.62-3, Polonius to Laertes

'A friend should bear his friend's infirmities.' Julius Caesar 4.3.85, Cassius to Brutus

'Friendship is constant in all things Save in the office and affairs of love.' Much Ado About Nothing 2.1.166-7, Claudio

'I count myself in nothing else so happy As in a soul remembering my good friends.' Richard II 2.3.46-7, Bolingbroke to Percy

'The band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their amity.' Antony and Cleopatra 2.6.150, Enobarbus

'Thy friendship makes us fresh.' 1 Henry VI 3.3.87, Charles to the Bastard of Orleans

'To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes, Recanting goodness, sorry ere 'tis shown; But where there is true friendship, there needs none.' Timon of Athens 1.2.20, Timon

'I desire you in friendship, and I will one way or other make you amends.' The Merry Wives of Windsor 3.1.133, Antonio

'To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.' The Winter's Tale 1.2.135, Leontes

'Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice And could of men distinguish her election, Sh'ath sealed thee for herself.' Hamlet 3.2.75-7, Hamlet to Horatio

'I would not wish Any companion in the world but you.' The Tempest 3.1.60-1, Miranda to Ferdinand

'If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not As to thy friends; for when did friendship take A breed for barren metal of his friend?' The Merchant of Venice 1.3.133, Antonio to Shylock

'There is flattery in friendship.' Henry V 3.7.102, Constable to Orleans

'That which I would discover The law of friendship bids me to conceal.' The Two Gentlemen of Verona 3.1.5-6, Proteus to the Duke

'Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time.' Troilus and Cressida 3.3.180-1, Ulysses to Achilles

'Aristotle: the best thing for friends is to live together. But in what way? Cervantes: the best thing for friends is to travel together. We are always traveling anyway, the journey just makes it visible. Friendship is not based on a plan - like marriage. Nor does it presuppose a common endeavor, like citizenship. Nor is it based on a principle, like a system of justice. It's the pure association of free individuals, which will (or won't) survive whatever life throws at it. Quixote fails as a knight; Sancho fails as a governor. But in the course of an accident-filled quest, they succeed in creating a friendship, not an equal one, ended only by death.'

This apophrism comes from 'Pessimism' by Joshua Foa Dienstag - who incidentally makes comments about aphorisms that might apply to the very best of blogging: they make you see a horizon, imagine possibilities you never thought possible, have the virtue of reflecting life in their fragmentation, and are accessible. (He also points out that aphorisms take time and effort to write!)

I would agree, more or less, with his thought on friendship (though I actually think the distance between Aristotle's living together and Cervantes' traveling is not so great). The only bit I'd question is friendship as a free association. Do we really form friends freely? Are they not the people whom we bump into in life and then adhere to - what made us first stick becoming an ever deeper devotion? So if friendship is not a plan, endeavor or principle, it is a love, born of coincidence, bearing fruit of commitment.

From 'To Those Born Later' by Bertolt Brecht:

...we know:

Hatred, even of meanness,

Contorts the features.

Anger, even against injustice

Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we

Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness

Could not ourselves be friendly.

'I see (therapy) as having a conversation with someone who is objective and intelligent - and can read me like a book. If you go to your friends, they don't always come up with the answers that you need, or they'll support you in a way that is not healthy.'

Boy George (in today's Observer).

Some new quotes that have come my way this week.

1. Confucius: "Have no friends not equal to yourself." The Confucian Analects, bk 1:8, iii.

2. Blaise Pascal: "I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world." Pensees.

3. Jeremy Thorpe: "Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his friends for his life" - said of Harold Macmillan's 1962 Night of the Long Knives when he sacked most of the senior members of his cabinet to save his political career.

From Melvyn Bragg's newsletter after the In Our Time programme on friendship, a few quotes...

John Aubrey (1626-1697) is about as far away from Aristotle as you could be. A gossip, a chatterbox, a brilliant anecdotal historian, a close observer of the foibles of individuals he spotted as famous and not only for his own time. Of Francis Beaumont and his relationship with Fletcher he wrote, "There was a wonderful consimility of phansey between him and Mr John Fletcher, which caused that dearness of friendship between them .. They lived together on the Bank side, not far from the Playhouse, both bachelors; lay together; had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same clothes and cloak, &c.; between them."

Nowadays they would be exposed in a tabloid.

It's interesting that the idea of the false friend appears just before Aubrey but coincidental with the time of Shakespeare. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) writes, "A false friend is more dangerous than an open enemy." Had I used this, it would have given us a way in to talk much more intensely about the dark, indeed the demonic, side of friendship as portrayed so often in Shakespeare's histories and tragedies. These seem to me as true of friendship as the loves and loyalties portrayed in his comedies.

Still around that wonderful period in our history, there is this from the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, "Forsake not an old friend; for the new is not comparable to him; a new friend is as new wine; when it is old, thou shalt drink it with pleasure." I think we could have had quite a bit of enjoyment with that.

And just a few more for fun. "Friendship is love without his wings" (Byron). And here we have one from a Prime Minister, George Canning (1770-1827), "Give me the avowed, erect and manly foe;

Firm I can meet, perhaps return the blow;

But of all plagues, good Heaven, thy wrath can send,

Save me, oh, save me, from the candid friend."

There are more modern quotations. Here are two from Americans. Emerson; "A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud." And Gore Vidal; "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies."

But let's finish with the great Dr Johnson quoted by Boswell, "If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair."

If you read anything about the life of Truman Capote, as you readily can at this time, you'd be forgiven for concluding that he was a tetchy, indulgent and - in terms of being close - infrequent friend.

Here was the man blamed for more celebrity couple breakups, on account of his lies about them, than the gossip columns.

He once commented that real conversations almost never take place because they require not just one but two intelligent people.

George Plimpton's biography is entitled: 'Truman Capote: In which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career'. Note the 3 to 1 against friendship.

And in a very public spat with friend Kenneth Tynan, after Tynan damned 'In Cold Blood' with the line: 'No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life,' he replied that Tynan had 'the morals of a baboon and the guts of a butterfly'. That was that.

However, he also said: 'Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.'

And I always warm to the person prepared to make the distinction between quality and quantity in matters of amity.