On friendship

Many people have tried to express the essence of friendship, but I think that nobody did it as well as Montaigne, when he thought of Étienne de La Boétie, his friend who had died several years before: “Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi” (Because it was he, because it was I). Friendship with a person is something that we do not have with hidden thoughts in the mind, it is not something we have for trying to get something else. Somebody is a friend for us and we are a friend for that person simply because of who that person is, his or her good sides, his or her bad sides. And that is what Montaigne expressed.