(4.) Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love. (5.) As long as love lasts, it feeds on itself, and sometimes by those very means which seem rather likely to extinguish it, such as caprice, severity, absence, jealousy. Friendship, on the contrary, needs every assistance, and dies from want of attention, confidence, and kindness. (6.) It is not so difficult to meet with excessive love as with perfect friendship. (7.) Love and friendship exclude each other. (8.) A man who is passionately in love neglects friendship, and one whose whole feelings are for friendship has none to give to love. (9.) Love begins with love; and the warmest friendship cannot change even to the coldest love. (10.) Nothing is more like the most ardent friendship than those acquaintances which we cultivate for the sake of our love. (11.) We never love with all our heart and all our soul but once, and that is the first time we love. Subsequent inclinations are less instinctive. (12.) Sudden love takes the longest time to be cured. (13.) Love, slow and gradual in its growth, is too much like friendship ever to be a violent passion. (14.) A man who loves so ardently that he wishes he were able to love ever so many thousand times more than he does, yields in love to none but to a man who loves more intensely than he could wish. (15.) If I were to admit that in the ebullitions of a violent passion one may love another person better than oneself, whom should I please most—those who love or those who are beloved? (16.) Men are not seldom inclined to fall in love, but cannot succeed in their desire; they seek every opportunity of being conquered, but fail to meet it, and, if I may say so, are compelled to remain at liberty. (17.) Those who love too violently at first, soon contribute individually to their loving one another less, and, finally, to their not loving one another any longer. It is not so easy to decide who is most to blame for this rupture, the man or the woman. Women accuse men of being inconstant, and men retort that women are fickle. (18.) However particular we may be in love, we pardon more faults in love than in friendship. (19.) It is a sweet revenge to a man who loves passionately to make an ungrateful mistress appear still more so, by his very actions. (20.) It is a sorry circumstance to love when we have not a fortune large enough to render those whom we love so happy that there is nothing more they can wish for. (21.) If a woman with whom we have been violently in love, and who has not returned our passion, afterwards renders us some important services, she will hardly meet with anything but ingratitude. (22.) A lively gratitude denotes a great esteem and affection for the person who lays us under some obligation. (23.) To be in the company of those whom we love satisfies us; it does not signify whether we dream of them, speak or not speak to them, think of them or think of indifferent things, as long as we are near them.