When you are young, have friends who are older; when you are old, have friends who are younger.

Indeed, in addition to its lessons of thrift, industry, and prudence, Franklin's autobiography tells us every man should be part of a social group, if not three. He believed that a group of like-minded, achievement-oriented individuals could dramatically leverage each other's success to do things otherwise impossible.

He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.

The world is a great leveller, and every year brings with it certain modifying influences. I like a man to be his age. Twenty-one is not an age I am very partial to: it is omniscient and exorbitant and cruel; but I like a youth of twenty-one none the less. Forty makes better company: when a man knows how little he knows, and how little life holds for him, and is yet unsubdued.

I always wanted to have many friends, unfortunately, friends are formed with years, and not everybody know how to respond as a friend.

I didn't know what made things tick. I didn't know what made people want to be friends. I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interactions.

I had my group of friends, you know, like my real group of friends, and then I had, like, party friends.

Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.
“Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.

I don't know; I guess maybe I'm atypical, but I know that the groups I work in—for instance, CORE had no color line, and Peacemakers had no color line—didn't have any age line either. For a while I think I was about the youngest person in Peacemakers, and I felt very close to somebody who was in her 80s, and...even now, I don't feel that age difference. I mean, I'm getting older; I know that. But I have friends who are one–third my age, one–fourth my age, and we're just on the same boundary. So I don't really know that—I really couldn't tell you much about that, because, or couldn't speak much to that. I think most of the people who were people who were against the war, or in a very active way, and I don't mean just saying it, but doing something, didn't have those kinds of barriers, weren't divided into that... Now in the general population, I honestly don't know.

How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.

"The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love" — in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets."

A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.

He loved his kind, but sought the love of few,
And valued old opinions more than new.

He is young but he thinks old.