You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your
griefs to your friend.

--_Shakespeare_.

* * * * *

When a man cannot fitly play his own part, if he have not a friend he
may quit the stage.

--_Bacon_.

* * * * *

We want one or two companions of intelligence, probity, and grace, to
wear out life with; persons by whom we can measure ourselves, and who
shall hold us fast to good sense and virtue.

--_Emerson_.

* * * * *

A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and
talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. In a great town
friends are scattered, so that there is not that fellowship, for the
most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go farther and
affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude, to want
true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness. Whosoever in
the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he
taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.