Discover the French sentence "Loin des yeux loin du cœur"

Get prepared to learn everything you ever wanted to know about the basic French proverb “Loin des yeux loin du cœur”.

To be more precise, it includes a detailed explanation of what it is and how to use it in a conversation with an audio example. But that’s not all, we also sprinkled some useful stuff like dialogue example, literal meaning, slow pronunciation audio and more!

Oh and… on this page you can find more of these proverbs tutorials plus the ultimate directory of all our French words tutorials on this page. Happy learning!

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French to English translation

Pronunciation guide

Slow pronunciation

Normal pronunciation

What does it mean?

Definition

The literal meaning is:

  • Loin → Far
  • des yeux→ of/from the eyes
  • loin → far
  • du coeur → of/from the heart

This proverb has Latin roots (from a poem by Properce, 1st century BC) and is very similar to the English one “Out of sight, out of mind“. It says that the distance between two people weakens the affection they have for each other.

How to use

Use it as general wisdom. For example, if a friend is telling you about the troubles of his/her long distance relationship, you can say: “Loin des yeux, loin du coeur.” (Far from the eyes, far from the heart)

Fun stuff

There aren’t any popular synonyms, but weirdly, there is an antonym: “Loin des yeux, près du coeur” (Far from the eyes, close to the heart)

It means that even if you are far from someone you love, the feelings are still strong. Which one do you think is true?

Example in a story with French audio

Now, let’s see a complete example of this saying in a story with slow French audio and the English translation below.
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Fantômes du passé
Ghosts of the past
___
Quand Brigitte a un dilemme, elle demande toujours conseil à son frère, Nicolas.
When Brigitte has a dilemma, she always asks advice to her brother, Nicolas.
C’était le cas aujourd’hui, alors elle l’appela et lui demanda s’il était disponible.
That was the case today, so she called him and asked if he was available.
Nicolas était inquiet, il sentait au ton de sa voix que Brigitte voulait parler d’un sujet important…
Nicolas was concerned, he felt in her voice that Brigitte wanted to talk about an important topic…
Lors de leur rencontre, Nicolas remarqua que Brigitte était stressée.
During their meeting, Nicolas noticed that Brigitte was stressed.
Nicolas:   Salut, comment ça va ?
Hi, how are you?
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