Guests at a Banquet, tempera facsimile by Nina de Garis Davies after a fourteenth-century-BC Egyptian frieze, c. 1920.

Guests at a Banquet, tempera facsimile by Nina de Garis Davies after a fourteenth-century-bc Egyptian frieze, c. 1920. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1930.

Friendship

Volume XIV, Number 2 | spring 2021

Miscellany

Dale Carnegie’s best-selling How to Win Friends and Influence People originated from a popular nighttime lecture he used to deliver at the YMCA. The book lists six ways to make people like you: be interested in others, smile, remember a person’s name, be a good listener, talk in terms of the other person’s interests, and make the other person feel important. Novelist Sinclair Lewis summed up Carnegie’s advice: “Smile and bob and pretend to be interested in other people’s hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.”

Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

—Jane Austen, 1811