Love Quote by Joseph Butler

Self-love, Butler warns, is not the same thing as happiness; it can even be the engine of misery. Coming from an 18th-century Anglican clergyman, that’s not a Hallmark paradox but a moral diagnosis aimed at a culture newly fascinated by “self-interest” as the master key to human behavior. In Butler’s world, it was increasingly fashionable to explain virtue as disguised selfishness, or to treat the pursuit of personal satisfaction as a reliable path to the good life. He refuses both comforts.

The line’s bite is in its almost clinical phrasing: “entire and unbounded affection” sounds like a virtue until you realize it describes a kind of emotional monopoly. When the self becomes the only object worthy of devotion, every frustration registers as an injury, every disappointment as a personal affront, every comparison as a verdict. Boundless self-concern doesn’t soothe; it inflames. It creates a person exquisitely sensitive to slights and relentlessly hungry for control in a world that won’t comply.

Butler’s intent is also theological without being merely pious. He’s arguing that humans are built with multiple “principles” - appetites, conscience, benevolence - and that psychic well-being depends on their proper order. Self-love has a legitimate role (prudence, self-preservation), but when it becomes totalizing it crowds out the outward-facing attachments that stabilize life: duty, relationship, service, awe. The subtext is bracingly modern: you can be deeply committed to yourself and still be trapped in a shrinking, anxious universe.