The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.
Thus nature has no love for solitude, and always leans, as it were, on some support; and the sweetest support is found in the most intimate friendship.
Nothing so cements and holds together all the parts of a society as faith or credit, which can never be kept up unless men are under some force or necessity of honestly paying what they owe to one another.
If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.
When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of penetrating into the future: when I behold such a number of arts and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries hence arising,--I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal.