There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), a French nobleman shaped by court life, political intrigue, and the moral skepticism of the salons, distilled his observations into brief maxims about human motives. This sentence is one of his reflections on love and self-deception, written in the milieu of seventeenth-century aristocratic society where reputation, etiquette, and strategic concealment were everyday arts. In that environment, people often attempted either to hide genuine attachments for prudential reasons or to feign passion for advantage. La Rochefoucauld’s point is that such performances have limits: time and repeated contact expose what is real and what is merely acted.

The maxim argues that love is ultimately legible: it leaks through behavior, attention, and consistency, and it also resists being convincingly fabricated. La Rochefoucauld treats emotion less as a private inner state than as something revealed by patterns over time—what one cannot help doing, and what one cannot sustain doing without feeling. The second clause is as important as the first: not only does true love betray itself, but false love eventually collapses because it lacks the depth to endure inconvenience, sacrifice, or boredom. The aphorism thus critiques both secrecy and social performance, suggesting that authenticity is tested by duration.

1) “There is no disguise that can long conceal love where it exists, or long feign it where it does not.”
2) “There is no disguise which can long conceal love where it exists, nor can it long be simulated where it does not.”
3) “There is no disguise that can for long conceal love where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.”