Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

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

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

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

It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.

It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.

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

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

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

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

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

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

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

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.

In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.

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.

Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.

Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.

The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.

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

Heat of blood makes young people change their inclinations often, and habit makes old ones keep to theirs a great while.