Love Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Love, in La Rochefoucauld's hands, is less a sacred force than a social rumor with good PR. Pairing it with ghosts is a deliciously cutting move: both are things people swear they believe in, trade stories about, and use to decorate their identities, yet almost no one can produce credible evidence. The line works because it punctures the romance industry of his era without sounding like a sermon. It’s a salon-ready paradox: smooth on the surface, corrosive underneath.

The intent is not to deny love outright, but to demote it from certainty to hearsay. La Rochefoucauld, the great anatomist of self-interest, is implying that what passes for "true love" is often performance, convenience, vanity, or appetite dressed up in noble language. The ghost comparison also suggests a psychological need: people want love to be real the way they want a haunting to be real, because it gives life narrative charge and moral drama. Belief becomes a kind of participation.

Context matters. Writing in 17th-century French aristocratic culture, he’s observing a world of courtship as strategy, marriage as alliance, reputation as currency. His maxims are engineered to survive that environment: short, lethal, and plausible enough to repeat at dinner. The subtext is a warning about credulity, especially the flattering credulity of thinking one's own feelings are exceptional. If everyone "talks about it", love becomes a language game; if few have "seen it", then the real rarity is not affection but honesty.