François de La Rochefoucauld

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

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

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

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

There are few people who are not ashamed of their love affairs when the infatuation is over.

We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.

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.

Those who occupy their minds with small matters, generally become incapable of greatness.

We pardon to the extent that we love.

We can never be certain of our courage until we have faced danger.