Love Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Love, in La Rochefoucauld's hands, is less a sacred bond than a provisional mood - a form of vanity that can be traded up. The line moves with the clean cruelty of a man who watched court society turn feelings into currency. "Pass" suggests something almost bureaucratic: you transfer out of love the way you might leave a post. Ambition, by contrast, has gravity. Once it takes hold, it doesn't simply replace love; it reorganizes the self around status, leverage, and attention.

The asymmetry is the point. Love is portrayed as porous and reversible in theory, yet socially fragile: it asks for vulnerability, time, and a willingness to be unstrategic. Ambition rewards the opposite. At Louis XIV's court - La Rochefoucauld's laboratory - advancement depended on calculation, allegiance, and relentless self-presentation. In that ecosystem, returning "from ambition to love" isn't just emotionally difficult; it's structurally irrational. You don't step away from the game without losing your rank, your network, your narrative.

The subtext is a grim joke about modernity before modernity: we like to imagine ambition as love's partner (provide, achieve, build a life). La Rochefoucauld treats it as love's solvent. Not because people stop feeling, but because ambition trains them to experience even intimacy as a contest - and contests rarely end with surrender.

He's also warning the reader about time. Love belongs to an earlier chapter, when you can afford to be absorbed by someone else. Ambition is what happens when the world convinces you that absorption is a luxury.