If you seriously want to be a friend or have a real friend, you need to cut out these toxic opinions. Hate them. Drive them from your mind. When you do this, you'll stop blaming yourself. You won't fight with yourself. You won't keep changing your mind or torturing yourself. And with another person who thinks like you, you'll be a complete and total friend. You'll also be patient with people who think differently. You'll be kind and gentle with them. You'll forgive them because they're ignorant and mistaken about the most important things. But you won't be harsh with anyone. You'll remember Plato's teaching: every mind loses truth against its will. If you can't do this, you can still act like friends in other ways — drink together, live together, travel together. You might even be born from the same parents. But snakes are born from the same parents too. Neither they nor you will be true friends as long as you hold onto these brutal, damaging opinions.
And let every man among you who has seriously resolved either to be a friend himself or to have another for his friend, cut out these opinions, hate them, drive them from his soul. And thus first of all he will not reproach himself, he will not be at variance with himself, he will not change his mind, he will not torture himself. In the next place, to another also, who is like himself, he will be altogether and completely a friend. But he will bear with the man who is unlike himself, he will be kind to him, gentle, ready to pardon on account of his ignorance, on account of his being mistaken in things of the greatest importance; but he will be harsh to no man, being well convinced of Plato's doctrine that every mind is deprived of truth unwillingly. If you cannot do this, yet you can do in all other respects as friends do, drink together, and lodge together, and sail together, and you may be born of the same parents, for snakes also are: but neither will they be friends, nor you, so long as you retain these bestial and cursed opinions.