Love Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Narcissism rarely gets such a clean, almost charitable punchline. Lichtenberg turns self-love into a kind of strategic retreat: if you choose yourself as your beloved, competition disappears. It’s a joke built like an epigram should be built - a tidy “advantage” that sounds like prudence until you notice the emotional catastrophe it’s smuggling in.

The line works because it performs a bait-and-switch between the language of romance and the logic of social comparison. “Rivals” belongs to courtship, status, and the marketplace of affection; Lichtenberg uses it to expose how love is often treated as a contest rather than a bond. If the goal is to win, the safest opponent is none at all. The “advantage” is real in the narrowest sense, but it’s also damning: the self-lover has made intimacy impossible and calls it efficiency.

Lichtenberg’s context matters. An Enlightenment-era scientist with a satirist’s eye, he favored observations that feel empirical even when they’re moral. The sentence reads like a lab note on human behavior: remove variables (other people), reduce risk (rejection), guarantee outcome (self-adoration). That clinical framing is the cruelty - it suggests vanity isn’t just a flaw, it’s a system for avoiding vulnerability.

Under the wit sits a darker diagnosis: the narcissist isn’t triumphant, just insulated. No rivals, sure. Also no real beloved, no friction, no growth. It’s a lonely victory lap.