The sane do not love, calculate and plan. The sane do not have the brain to dream, they ignore dreams. All the great lovers were touched by the madness: Bolivar, Reverón, Cervantes, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Hölderlin ... In truth all the great German poets (romantics) were not of this world. A poet can not be of this world.
I have discovered that Bolívar was an inveterate reader of the works of Cicero, and I am sure that he was his favorite writer. Everything Bolivar wrote touched by the sensitivity of love and friendship breathes pure ciceronismo. Bolivar was cultivated reading mainly the Greek and Latin classics.
Speaking of Scipio, Cicero emphasizes the affability of his habits, of tenderness towards his mother, of liberality with his sisters, of kindness with his friends and of justice with everyone.
FRIENDSHIP is something that arises from the nature of two beings, and is something that is far beyond kinship. Because kinship can last without love, friendship instead, because when friendship is lacking, friendship dies.
Friendship is a supreme consent in divine and human things with love and benevolence; it is a gift so great that Cicero does not know if the gods have granted another greater than mortals.
Because what more sublime thing when the life rests in the mutual benevolence of a friend; have someone to talk to as freely as you can talk to yourself. To have someone who feels as much as one of our joys and sorrows.
Friendship embraces many things, everywhere it takes place, it is never impertinent, never annoying. And more we come to serve it than the air itself, fire and water. Friendship has nothing to do with an interested or vulgar relationship, with a passing.
Friendship creates good hopes for everything that can happen and does not let them fail or temper. Because the true friend looks at the other as an image of himself, and so the absent, the needy abundant, the weak are powerful. The living dead are made, such is the honor, the desire, the memory that always follows them from their friends. In this way it seems the death of a happy one, and the life of others worthy of praise.
If the union of benevolence is banished from the world, no house, no city will survive, not even the cultivation of the fields will remain. Because, what house is so strong, what a stable city that hatred and discord can not overthrow?
Everything that moves in the universe unites and contracts friendship, and dissipates or discord breaks them. In friendship nothing is feigned, nothing hidden, everything in it is true, and everything comes from the will. So friendship is more the daughter of nature than of necessity. And more with the sense of love than the thought of the profits that can be reported.
The one who trusts most in himself and is well-endowed with wisdom is excellent and purposeful in seeking and maintaining friendships.
We insist: all friendship sustained in the interest as soon as this lack disappears.
Scipio said that it was difficult for a friendship to last until the end of life, and it is so painful to reach old age without a friend, without the fresh and benevolent breath of a superior being with whom to talk and share what is worth. penalty: poetry, good reading, extraordinary thoughts.
