Few men have the natural strength to honour a friend's success without envy.

The saying observes how difficult it is to respond generously to someone close to us when they prosper. A friend’s success can feel like a mirror held up to our own ambitions and insecurities, making envy a common, almost reflexive reaction. The “natural strength” named here is moral and emotional resilience: the capacity to celebrate another’s good fortune without converting it into a private grievance or a measure of one’s own lack. Read this way, the line is less a cynical dismissal of friendship than a sober diagnosis of human psychology—one that implies an ethical ideal of magnanimity that must be cultivated rather than assumed.