Daily Inspiration Quote by Pierre Corneille

Corneille’s line has the clean, unsettling efficiency of a good stage aside: it flatters the listener with moral clarity while quietly accusing them of vanity. “Self-love” sounds like a modern wellness slogan, but in 17th-century France it lands closer to amour-propre - the combustible mix of pride, status-hunger, and self-regard that polite society pretends not to run on. Corneille, the great anatomist of honor, isn’t offering a gentle reminder to take care of yourself. He’s pointing at the hidden engine beneath every grand declaration of devotion.

The phrasing is strategic. “Source” implies origin and legitimacy, as if all love is a river fed by the same spring. That metaphor does double work: it naturalizes self-interest (of course it’s there), and it reframes “other loves” as downstream expressions - love of partner, family, country, God - that can’t fully escape the pressure of the self. The line doesn’t deny sincerity; it destabilizes it. Even sacrifice can be read as an investment in identity: the desire to be honorable, to be seen as good, to align with a cherished self-image.

Context matters because Corneille writes in a culture obsessed with virtue performed in public: the court, the salon, the theater itself. His characters love with speeches, vows, and reputations on the line. This aphorism belongs to that world, where emotion is never just private feeling but a social currency. The intent isn’t to sneer at love; it’s to expose how easily our most elevated attachments are staged for the one audience we can’t escape: ourselves.