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Self-love   /sɛlf-ləv/   Listen
noun
Self-love  n.  The love of one's self; desire for personal happiness; tendency to seek one's own benefit or advantage. "Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul."
Synonyms: Selfishness. Self-love, Selfishness. The term self-love is used in a twofold sense: 1. It denotes that longing for good or for well-being which actuates the breasts of all, entering into and characterizing every special desire. In this sense it has no moral quality, being, from the nature of the case, neither good nor evil. 2. It is applied to a voluntary regard for the gratification of special desires. In this sense it is morally good or bad according as these desires are conformed to duty or opposed to it. Selfishness is always voluntary and always wrong, being that regard to our own interests, gratification, etc., which is sought or indulged at the expense, and to the injury, of others. "So long as self-love does not degenerate into selfishness, it is quite compatible with true benevolence." "Not only is the phrase self-love used as synonymous with the desire of happiness, but it is often confounded with the word selfishness, which certainly, in strict propriety, denotes a very different disposition of mind."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Self-love" Quotes from Famous Books



... the mill, remembering how Lois had found him in Margret's office, not forgetting the cage: chary of this low life, even in the peril of his own. So, going out on the street, he tested his own nature by this trifle in his old fashion. "The ruling passion strong in death," eh? It had not been self-love; something deeper: an instinct rather than reason. Was he glad to think this of himself? He looked out more watchful of the face which the coming Christmas bore. The air was cold and pungent. The crowded city seemed wakening ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... ensued, in which the fragments of the situation broken by these words revolved before Colville's thought with kaleidoscopic variety, and he passed through all the phases of anger, resentment, wounded self-love, and ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells

... desolations of the Great Saharan Wilderness. This should teach us to lower our pretensions, and take a large discount from our merits in originating our various enterprises; but, alas! our over-weening self-love always manages to get the better of us. The brochure alluded to was a number of the Revue de L'Orient, published at Paris, containing a notice of Ghadames by M. Subtil, the notorious sulphur[6]-explorer and adventurer ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... moved in all the sentiments which correspond to the fibers of propriety and self-love. However, a worthy representative of the hospitality which prevailed in early days, he feigned to be talking very earnestly with D'Artagnan, and incessantly repeated:—"Ah! monsieur, what a ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... presence, to say that he was "sure Donna Sovrani would astonish the world by what she was doing!" So that one never quite knew where to have him, his nature being that curious compound of obsequious servility and intense self-love which so often distinguishes the Italian temperament. Angela however put every shadow of either wonder or doubt as to his views, entirely aside,—and worked on with an earnest hand and trusting heart, faithfully and with a grand patience and self-control ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli


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