I have always laid it down as a maxim -and found it justified by experience -that a man and a woman make far better friendships than can exist between two of the same sex -but then with the condition that they never have made or are to make love to each other.
The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.
A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.
There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?