Love Quote by Nicolas Malebranche

Malebranche opens with a disarming bit of moral autobiography: a plain-spoken inventory of desires that sounds almost too obvious to argue with. That’s the point. By grounding ethics in appetite rather than piety, he sidesteps the era’s scholastic hair-splitting and makes the reader complicit. If you admit you love pleasure and hate pain, you’ve already signed his contract.

The clever move is the escalation. He doesn’t stop at “people.” He drags in angels and demons, widening a private confession into a cosmic anthropology. In 17th-century France, where debates about grace, sin, and divine order were anything but abstract, that’s a strategic provocation. Malebranche is an Oratorian priest and a Cartesian: he wants morality to look like a kind of rational physics of the will. By claiming even demons share the same basic inclinations, he quietly separates desire from virtue. Wanting happiness isn’t holiness; it’s just how a mind is built. Evil becomes less a foreign substance than a mis-aimed pursuit of the same goods everyone wants.

The subtext is a defense of universality with teeth. If even demons pursue what appears good to them, then moral failure isn’t loving the wrong things (pleasure, happiness) but loving them in the wrong way, at the wrong level, or in the wrong object. He’s preparing the ground for a theocentric conclusion: we chase pleasure everywhere because we’re made to seek the highest good, and only God can satisfy that structure without contradiction.

It works because it flatters our self-knowledge while quietly indicting our choices: you’re not mistaken about what you want, only about where you think it can be found.