Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Bergamin

Bergamin needles a social double standard with the kind of aphoristic cruelty that lands because it’s tidy. The sentence is built like a courtroom comparison: same impulse (pride), two different verdicts. For men, pride gets laundered into “dignity,” a word that sounds civic, public, even necessary. For women, the identical posture is rebranded as “self-love,” a phrase that can mean healthy self-regard but, in the cultural ear Bergamin is targeting, often reads as vanity, narcissism, an unbecoming preoccupation with the self. The point isn’t psychological; it’s reputational. Who gets to appear principled when they defend themselves, and who gets dismissed as merely ego-driven?

As a Spanish writer formed by Catholic moral vocabularies and the gender codes of early 20th-century Europe, Bergamin is playing with how language polices behavior. “Dignity” is communal permission: a man’s pride becomes proof of honor, authority, boundaries. “Self-love” is suspicion: a woman’s pride becomes a private indulgence, a moral flaw, something to be corrected or softened for social comfort. The subtext is that society doesn’t just judge women more harshly; it edits their motives. A man’s self-respect is framed as ethical. A woman’s self-respect is framed as aesthetic, emotional, or selfish.

The line also exposes how compliment and insult can be the same mechanism. “Dignity” flatters men into pride; “self-love” scolds women out of it. Bergamin’s sting is that the bias lives inside the dictionary.