1All the more, then, is such great neglect of a thing so very necessary to be blamed. 1For friendship is the one thing in human life about whose usefulness all agree with one voice; 1although virtue itself is despised by many and said to be a kind of self-advertisement and display; 1many despise riches, being content with little and delighting in a meagre diet and dress; 1and as for offices, with desire for which some are inflamed, how many despise them so much that they think nothing emptier, nothing more trivial! 1So too with the other things which seem admirable to some, there are very many who think them worth nothing.
1About friendship all, to a man, think the same; 1both those who have devoted themselves to public life, and those who delight in knowledge and learning, and those who mind their own business at leisure; 1and lastly those who have given themselves wholly to pleasure feel that without friendship life is nothing, if only they wish to live in some degree like free men. 87For friendship somehow creeps through the lives of all, and allows no way of spending one's life to be without it. 87Indeed, even if someone is of such harshness and savagery of nature that he shuns and hates the company of men, as we are told some Timon or other was at Athens, yet even he could not bear not to seek out someone on whom to vomit the venom of his bitterness.
87And this would be best judged if something like this could happen: that some god should take us away from this crowd of men and set us somewhere in solitude, and there, supplying us with an abundance and plenty of all the things that nature desires, should take from us altogether the chance of seeing a human being; who would be so made of iron that he could bear that life, and from whom solitude would not take away the enjoyment of all pleasures? 88True, then, is that saying which, I believe, Archytas of Tarentum used often to repeat, as I have heard our old men recall, who had heard it from other old men: that if anyone had ascended into heaven and beheld the nature of the universe and the beauty of the stars, that wonder would be unpleasing to him, though it would have been most delightful if he had had someone to tell it to.
88So nature loves nothing solitary, and always leans upon something as a kind of prop, and this is sweetest in the dearest friend.