Keys to Friendship & Character | Success Podcasts
Inspirational Living: Life Lessons for Success & Happiness
The Living Hour
4.0 • 805 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Listen to episode 1080 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Keys to Friendship & Character. Edited and adapted from “On the Threshold” by Theodore Thornton Munger.
Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: There are many turning-points when the question of success or failure is decided again and again. Life is a campaign, in which a series of fortresses are to be taken; all previous victories and advances may be thrown away by failure in the next. Nearly the last of these is companionship; if one wins the victory here, the reward of a prosperous life of character is within his reach.
At the risk of logically inverting my subject, I will speak first of friendship; and I must beg your patience while I put a foundation under my suggestions. If there were but one general truth that I could lodge in the mind of anyone or all men and women, it would be this: that true life consists in the fulfillment of relations. We are born into relations; we never get out of them; all duty consists in meeting them. The family, the community, the humanity at large — these are the sources of our primary and abiding duties, as well as of our happiness — the sum-total of ethics and spirituality.
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Transcript
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| 1:39.2 | Welcome to the inspirational living podcast. |
| 1:51.0 | Today's reading was edited and adapted from On the Threshold by Theodore Thornton Munger, published in 1908. |
| 2:01.6 | Without a doubt, home and companions are the chief external influences that determine character. One is nearly always good, because it is charged with maternal and fatherly instincts. |
| 2:09.6 | The other is uncertain in its character, because it springs out of the chances of the world. |
| 2:23.9 | The main feature of a good home is love which, quote, works no ill. |
| 2:28.4 | Hence its natural influence is favorable to good character. |
| 2:36.1 | Good parents, for the most part, inculcate truth, purity, honesty, and kindness. |
| 2:40.0 | With abundant allowance for a mistake and neglect, |
| 2:46.2 | the influence of parents and brother and sister is ordinarily good. |
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