Love Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Love, for La Rochefoucauld, is least trustworthy when it feels most sincere. The line poses a conditional that’s almost a smirk: if a pure love exists at all, it isn’t the kind we announce, curate, or even recognize. It’s buried, “hidden in the bottom of our heart,” and the sharpest cut comes at the end: “which we know not ourselves.” He isn’t romanticizing mystery; he’s indicting self-knowledge.

The intent is characteristically Rochefoucauldian: to puncture the flattering story people tell about their motives. In the salons of 17th-century France, virtue and sentiment were social currencies, performed with exquisite polish. His Maxims specialize in exposing how quickly “love” becomes a dressed-up coalition of vanity, ambition, fear of loneliness, jealousy, and the desire to be seen as good. Calling that mixture “admixture” matters: the contamination isn’t dramatic; it’s normal, nearly chemical. Passion bleeds into passion until the label “pure” becomes a marketing term.

The subtext is almost cynical compassion. He concedes a possibility of uncorrupted affection, but only on the condition that it stays unconscious - inaccessible to ego, language, and reputation. The moment we can name it, we can use it, and once we can use it, it’s no longer “free.” That’s why the sentence works: it offers a sliver of idealism while ensuring it can’t be converted into self-congratulation.

Contextually, this is moral psychology before the modern vocabulary of the unconscious. Rochefoucauld anticipates a bleak insight: the self is a PR machine, and the purest feelings may be real precisely because they’re not available for display.