1There is also a kind of misfortune, sometimes a necessary one, in breaking off friendships; for our discourse is now slipping down from the intimacies of the wise to ordinary friendships. 1The faults of friends often break out, sometimes against their friends themselves, sometimes against strangers, yet so that the disgrace overflows onto the friends. 1Such friendships, therefore, must be washed out by a slackening of intercourse and, as I heard Cato say, unstitched rather than torn apart, unless some quite intolerable wrong has flared up, such that it is neither right nor honourable, nor indeed possible, to avoid an immediate estrangement and separation. 77But if some change either of character or of interests has taken place, as usually happens, or if disagreement over political parties has come between friends (for I am now speaking, as I said a little earlier, not of the friendships of the wise but of ordinary ones), we shall have to take care not to seem not only to have laid aside a friendship, but also to have taken up an enmity.
77For nothing is more disgraceful than to wage war with someone with whom you have lived as an intimate. 77Scipio had withdrawn from friendship with Quintus Pompeius on my account, as you know; 77and because of a disagreement that existed in public affairs, he was estranged from our colleague Metellus; 77in both cases he acted with dignity and restraint, and with feelings offended but not embittered. 78Wherefore our first effort must be that no breaches between friends occur, but if anything of the kind should happen, that the friendships should seem to have burnt out rather than to have been stamped out. 78But we must beware that friendships do not even turn into bitter enmities, from which quarrels, abuse and insults are born.
78Yet if these are bearable, they must be borne, and this honour must be paid to an old friendship, that the one who does the wrong is at fault, not the one who suffers it. 78In general there is one precaution and one provision against all these faults and inconveniences: that men should not begin to love too quickly, nor love the unworthy. 79Those are worthy of friendship who have in themselves a reason why they should be loved. 79A rare kind! 79and indeed all splendid things are rare, and nothing is harder than to find something which is in every respect perfect of its kind. 79But most people recognise nothing as good in human affairs unless it is profitable, and they love their friends, as they would cattle, chiefly those from whom they hope to reap the greatest profit.
80Thus they lack that most beautiful and most natural friendship, sought for itself and for its own sake, nor are they an example to themselves of what this power of friendship is, and how great. 80For each man loves himself, not in order to exact from himself some reward for his affection, but because each is dear to himself for his own sake; 80and unless this same feeling is transferred to friendship, a true friend will never be found: for a friend is, as it were, a second self. 81But if this is evident in animals, in birds, fish and beasts of the field, tame and wild, first that they love themselves (for this is born alike with every living creature), and next that they seek and long for creatures of their own kind to attach themselves to (and do this with longing and with a certain likeness to human love), how much more does this happen by nature in man, who both loves himself and seeks another whose mind he may so blend with his own as almost to make one out of two!