Quotes from Francois de La Rochefoucauld

There are few people who would not be ashamed of being loved when they love no longer.

The more we love, the nearer we are to hate.

Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love.

If there be a love pure and free from the admixture of our other passions, it is that which lies hidden in the bottom of our heart, and which we know not ourselves.

There are two sorts of constancy in love one arises from continually discovering in the loved person new subjects for love, the other arises from our making a merit of being constant.

If one judges love according to the greatest part of the effects it produces, it would appear to resemble rather hatred than kindness.

We may sooner be brought to love them that hate us, than them that love us more than we would have them do.

There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.

We forgive just so long as we love.

We pardon as long as we love.

Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests, and an exchange of good offices; it is a species of commerce out of which self-love always expects to gain something.

In love deceit nearly always goes further than mistrust.

Friendship is a traffic wherein self-love always proposes to be the gainer.

There are several remedies which will cure love, but there are no infallible ones.

Prudence and love are inconsistent; in proportion as the last increases, the other decreases.

Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill conducted, constitutes virtue and vice.

Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands.

As long as we love, we can forgive.

Our self-love can less bear to have our tastes than our opinions condemned.

There is a sort of love whose very excessiveness prevents the lover's being jealous.

Unfaithfulness ought to extinguish love, and we should not be jealous when there is reason to be. Only those who give no grounds for jealousy are worthy of it.

Love has its name borrowed by a great number of dealings and affairs that are attributed to it--in which it has no greater part than the Doge in what is done at Venice.

Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope, or to fear.

There is real love just as there are real ghosts; every person speaks of it, few persons have seen it.