Love Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire overturns the old cliche that love is blind, insisting that the real blindness lies in self-love. Affection for another can sharpen perception; it forces attention outward, demands empathy, and invites the discomfort of seeing from someone elses point of view. Self-love, by contrast, wraps the self in flattering light, excuses errors, and edits memory. It is the wellspring of rationalizations: I did not err, I was compelled; I am not vain, I am deservedly praised. The mind becomes attorney and judge in its own case, and acquittal is guaranteed.

As an Enlightenment satirist bent on exposing hypocrisy and fanaticism, Voltaire targets amour-propre, the self-regard that masks private interest as virtue. He inherits a line from the French moralists, like La Rochefoucauld, who dissected the vanity that animates even noble gestures. Voltaire extends the critique to the public sphere. Courts that imagine themselves impartial, churches that claim pure zeal, nobles who posture as guardians of honor: all can be blinded by self-love. In the Calas affair and other campaigns for justice, he showed how prejudice and institutional pride distort vision more than any Cupid ever could.

The point is not to denigrate love but to defend clarity. Romantic infatuation may misread details, but it is at least a movement beyond the self. Self-love narrows the field of view, and the smaller the circle of concern, the darker the room. The blindness multiplies when self-love becomes collective: party loyalty presented as principle, nationalism as moral superiority, sectarianism as piety. The result is cruelty without remorse, because the self sees itself as right by definition.

Voltaire offers a practical ethic: distrust the stories you tell about yourself. Seek contradiction. Let other people, and evidence, correct the flattering portrait. If sight is to be regained, it will be through the discipline of looking past the mirror.