It is far from noble to cultivate friendship to secure something we lack

If people think that friendship springs from weakness and from a purpose to secure someone through whom we may obtain that which we lack, they assign her, if I may so express it, a lowly pedigree indeed, and an origin far from noble, and they would make her the daughter of poverty and want. M. Tullius Cicero. De Amicitia. Laelius on friendship. Section 29.

Image: Penelope mourning by Johann Valentin Sonnenschein at the Bode Museum in Berlin. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Andreas Praefcke.