On Friendship (Penguin Great Ideas)

For the perfect friendship which I am talking about is indivisible: each gives himself so entirely to his friend that he has nothing left to share with another: on the contrary, he grieves that he is not two-fold, three-fold or four-fold and that he does not have several souls, several wills, so that he could give them all to the one he loves.

[Love is the striving to establish friendship on the external signs of beauty.]*

Moreover what we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances and familiar relationships bound by some chance or some suitability, by means of which our souls support each other. In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them

hoping by this mental alliance to strike a more firm and durable match.

Mediating this union there was, beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can say specifically about it, some inexplicable force of destiny.

Not one of his actions could be set before me – no matter what it looked like – without my immediately discovering its motive.

one soul in bodies twain,

This friendship has had no ideal to follow other than itself; no comparison but with itself.

Yet it is far from being the best he was capable of.