But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognized by the police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realized, and some principle to guide simple folk in their selection.
What I know for sure is that if you can survive 11 days in cramped quarters with a friend and come out laughing, your friendship is the real deal. I know ours is.
I have had, and may have still, a thousand friends, as they are called, in life, who are like one's partners in the waltz of this world -not much remembered when the ball is over.
The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.
I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end... I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.
We rejoice in the joys of our friends as much as we do our own, and we are equally grieved at their sorrows. Wherefore the wise people will feel toward their friends as they do toward themselves, and whatever labor they would encounter with a view to their own pleasure, they will encounter also for the sake of their friends.
He who has achieved this state Is unconcerned with friends and enemies, With good and harm, with honor and disgrace. This therefore is the highest state of man.