We can never replace a friend. When a man is fortunate enough to have several, he finds they are all different. No one has a double in friendship.
—Schiller.
“What is the secret of your life?” asked Mrs. Browning of Charles Kingsley; “tell me, that I may make mine beautiful too.” He replied, “I had a friend.”
What we usually call friends are only acquaintances and familiarities brought together through some particular occasion or use, by which some little intercourse exists between our souls; but in the friendship of which I speak they are so tightly joined together one to the other, in so universal a mixture, that it effaces all signs of the seam by which they were first joined.
—Montaigne.