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“What can be more delightful than to have someone to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as yourself? Is not prosperity robbed of half its value if you have no one to share your joy? On the other hand, misfortunes would be hard to bear if there were not someone to feel them even more acutely than yourself….Such friendship enhances prosperity, and relieves adversity of its burden by halving and sharing it. And great and numerous as are the blessings of friendship, this certainly is the sovereign one, that it gives us bright hopes for the future and forbids weakness and despair.
In the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor; though he be weak, his friend’s strength is his;
and in his friend’s life he enjoys a second life after his own is finished.”
- Cicero
