Friendship, on the other hand, serves a great host of different purposes all at the same time. In whatever direction you turn, it still remains yours. No barrier can shut it out. It can never be untimely; it can never be in the way. We need friendship all the time, just as much as we need the proverbial prime necessities of life, fire and water.
The evil implanted in man by nature spreads so imperceptibly, when the habit of wrong-doing is unchecked, that he himself can set no limit to his shamelessness.
Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.
There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.
This seems to be advanced as the surest basis for our belief in the existence of gods, that there is no race so uncivilized, no one in the world so barbarous that his mind has no inkling of a belief in gods.
No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest god.
[Lat., Fortis vero, dolorem summum malum judicans; aut temperans, voluptatem summum bonum statuens, esse certe nullo modo potest.]
Civilized people are taught by logic, barbarians, by necessity, communities by tradition; and the lesson inculcated even in wild beasts by nature itself. They learn that they have to defend their own bodies and persons lives from violence of any and every kind by all means within their power.
That he who hath the loan of money has not repaid it, and he who has repaid has not the loan; but he who has acknowledged a kindness has it still, and he who has a feeling of it has requited it.
What sweetness is left in life, if you take away friendship? Robbing life of friendship is like robbing the world of the sun. A true friend is more to be esteemed than kinsfolk.