Life & Wisdom Quote by Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

Vanity, in Lautreamont's hands, isn’t a charming flaw; it’s a cover story for self-disgust. He opens with a mock-historical sweep ("Throughout the centuries") only to puncture it with a cutting, almost clinical suspicion: human self-regard is less a judgment than a defensive reflex. The phrasing "I rather suppose" is doing sly work here, feigning modesty while delivering a brutal diagnosis. This isn’t an argument built on evidence so much as a trap built on psychology.

The quote’s real engine is its pivot from aesthetics to ethics. Beauty becomes a moral alibi: if man can declare himself beautiful, he can justify his dominance, his entitlement, his right to rank others. Lautreamont flips that logic by proposing scorn as the tell. If humans genuinely believed in their own beauty, why the compulsive contempt for other faces? The implication is that hierarchy is born from insecurity: you diminish the other to keep your own reflection intact.

Context matters. Writing in the 19th century’s shadow-boxing ring of Romanticism and emerging modernity, Lautreamont (best known for the feral, anti-humanist Maldoror) treats the civilized self-image as a thin varnish over cruelty. His France is steeped in bourgeois propriety, scientific classification, and colonial confidence; this line reads like a refusal of the era’s flattering portraits of Man. The subtext is corrosive: what we call pride may be panic, and what we call taste may be an excuse to sneer.