Francois de La Rochefoucauld Love Quotations

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.

The reason that lovers never weary each other is because they are always talking about themselves.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

We always love those who admire us, but we do not always love those whom we admire.

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

When we are in love we often doubt that which we most believe.

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.

It is with true love as it is with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.

If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.

Old people love to give good advice; it compensates them for their inability to set a bad example.

One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.

When a man must force himself to be faithful in his love, this is hardly better than unfaithfulness.

All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.

In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.

We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who love us more than we wish.

The heart is forever making the head its fool.

There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other.

The more one loves a mistress, the more one is ready to hate her.

We pardon to the extent that we love.

In love we often doubt what we most believe.

Jealously is always born with love but it does not die with it.

Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can; and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.

If we judge love by most of its effects, it resembles rather hatred than affection.

Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.

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

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

Love is the smallest part of gallantry.

Not to love is in love an infallible means of being loved.

There is a kind of love, the excess of which forbids jealousy.

Beautiful coquettes are quacks of love.

Jealousy is not love, but self-love.

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 is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.

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

As long as we love, we can forgive.

True friendship destroys envy, and true love destroys coquetterie.

As uncommon a thing as true love is, it is yet easier to find than true friendship.

The reason why most women have so little sense of friendship is that this is but a cold and flat passion to those that have felt that of love.

Women can more easily conquer their passion than their coquetterie.

The same strength of character which helps a man resist love, helps to make it more violent and lasting too. People of unsettled minds are always driven about with passions, but never absolutely filled with any.

There are people who would never have been in love, had they never heard love spoken of.

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

Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.

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.

A man is sometimes better off deceived about the one he loves, than undeceived.

A respectable man may love madly, but not foolishly.

Absence cools moderate passions, and inflames violent ones; just as the wind blows out candles, but kindles fires.

Considering how little the beginning or the ceasing to love is in our own power, it is foolish and unreasonable for the lover or his mistress to complain of one another's inconstancy.

Constancy in love is a perpetual inconstancy which fixes our hearts successively to all the qualities of the person loved--sometimes admiring one and sometimes another above all the rest--so that this constancy roves as far as it can, and is no better than inconstancy, confined within the compass of one person.

Constancy in love is of two sorts: One is the effect of new excellencies that are always presenting themselves afresh, and attractour affections continually; the other is only from a point of honor, and a taking of pride not to change.

In love deceit almost always outstrips distrust.

Jealousy is not so much the love of another as the love of ourselves.

No man can love a second time the person whom he has once truly ceased to love.

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.

Love is one and the same in the original; but there are a thousand different copies of it.

Lovers, when they are no longer in love, find it very hard to break up.

Some men are so full of themselves that when they fall in love, they amuse themselves rather with their own passion than with theperson they love.

Self-love is the love of a man's own self, and of everything else for his own sake. It makes people idolaters to themselves, and tyrants to all the world besides.

It is easier to fall in love when you are out of it than to get out of it when you are in.

The truest comparison we can make of love is to liken it to a fever; we have no more power over the one than the other, either as to its violence or duration.

If it were not for poetry, few men would ever fall in love.

The pleasure of love is in the loving; and there is more joy in the passion one feels than in that which one inspires.....

The greatest miracle of love is the cure of coquetry.

The pleasure of love is in loving.

If one judges love by the majority of its effects, it is more like hatred than like friendship.

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.

Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.

What makes lovers never tire of one another is that they talk always about themselves.

People would never fall in love if they hadn't heard love talked about.

A woman is faithful to her first lover for a long time - unless she happens to take a second.

When love becomes labored we welcome an act of infidelity towards ourselves to free us from fidelity.

When you plant a seed of love, it is you that blossoms. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati The 11 Karmic Spaces: Choosing Freedom from the Patterns That Bind You There are two kinds of faithfulness in love: one is based on forever finding new things to love in the loved one; the other is based on our pride in being faithful.

In love deceit nearly always goes further than mistrust.

Love, all agreeable as it is, charms more by the fashion in which it displays itself, than by its own true merit.

The violence we do to ourselves in order to remain faithful to the one we love is hardly better than an act of infidelity.

The reason why lovers and their mistresses never tire of being together is that they are always talking of themselves. [Fr., Ce qui fait que amants et les maitresses ne s'ennuient point d'etre ensemble; c'est qu'ils parlent toujours d'eux memes.]

The smallest fault of women who give themselves up to love is to love.

Constancy in love ... is only inconstancy confined to one object.

Love is to the soul of him who loves, what the soul is to the body which it animates.

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