12e quote: “True friends are a consolation.”

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

V.
2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012)

“We console ourselves with several friends for not having found one real one.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

“Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

"Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine" as translated in The Simone Weil Reader (1957) edited by George A. Panichas, p. 417
Context: Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.