Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Self-love, in Voltaire's hands, isn’t a Hallmark slogan; it’s a survival technology with a PR problem. He treats amour-propre like the species’ reproductive instinct: not lofty, not optional, and certainly not pure. The comparison is doing quiet work. By yoking personal vanity to biological perpetuation, Voltaire drags moralists down from their pulpit and into the machinery of nature. You can condemn it, but you can’t delete it.

The line’s sting sits in its rhythm of admissions: “necessary,” “dear,” “gives us pleasure.” Voltaire isn’t pleading guilty so much as exposing the courtroom. Enlightenment culture loved reason, virtue, and civility, but it also ran on salons, patronage, reputation, and the fragile economy of being seen as disinterested. Self-love fuels achievement and self-protection, yet the era’s social codes demand that you perform modesty. Hence the final twist: “we must conceal it.” The moral requirement isn’t to eradicate self-love; it’s to disguise it convincingly.

That last clause is Voltaire at his most surgical. He implies that hypocrisy isn’t a personal failure so much as a social protocol: society punishes naked self-interest while quietly rewarding its effects. The subtext is cynical but clarifying: humans don’t become good by becoming selfless; they become workable by learning which motives can be admitted aloud. In a world built on appearances, virtue often functions as etiquette for desire.