Self-love (n.) is always recognizable in its unsightly form by involving reflection; in the immediate it is only the instinct of self-preservation — a sign of health, not an unseemly thing.
Self-love (n.) mistakes itself for love when a man is certain he cannot live without the beloved but will hear nothing of denying himself.
Self-love (n.) hides in the poet's love, which swears to love another more than oneself — that is the reason for its intoxicated language.
Self-love (n.) cannot tolerate duplication: it demands to be one, and “as thyself” is precisely a doubling.
Self-love (n.) rightly understood is the commandment's converse: “Thou shalt love thyself in the right way” — and that is at bottom the same as loving one's neighbor.
Self-love (n.) betrays itself in the jilted lover who complains he could love only one person: the louder the protest, the more it proves he was in love with love, a self-lover, who alone can be thus deceived.
Self-love (n.) is only improved and augmented in erotic love and friendship, which exchange mine and thine into ours — for 'our' is to fellowship exactly what 'mine' is to the individual.
Self-love (n.) when reasonable keeps the bird from self-torment; the self-tormentor hates himself.
Self-love (n.) cannot and should not be absent from loving God, in the sense of needing him; to love him with none of it would be imagining one could love him without needing him.