Life & Wisdom Quote by Lord Byron

Byron’s line is a confession that doubles as a defense mechanism: if everyone is selfish, then no one gets to claim moral superiority, least of all the speaker. The bite is in the second clause. He doesn’t merely distrust other people’s “good motive”; he refuses to grant himself the flattering exception. It’s self-knowledge posed as principle, a way of sounding brutally honest while quietly insulating himself from disappointment, obligation, and the sentimental fraud of pure intention.

The phrasing matters. “We are all” turns a personal neurosis into a universal law, the classic move of a writer who understands how easily cynicism can pass as clarity. Yet “I no more trust myself” keeps it from becoming cheap misanthropy. Byron is doing what his work so often does: staging the self as both culprit and commentator, daring the reader to admire the candor even as it implicates them. The implied target is moral rhetoric itself - the public language of virtue that, in Byron’s era, carried enormous social leverage in a culture obsessed with respectability, reputation, and scandal.

Context sharpens the sting. Byron lived amid gossip, exile, and relentless scrutiny; he knew how quickly “good motives” get weaponized as social cover. Read this way, the line isn’t just bleak. It’s tactical. By distrusting his own motives, he preempts accusation and rejects the comforting story that art, love, politics, or charity can be neatly purified of ego. It’s a poet’s version of intellectual honesty, delivered with the cool, bruised swagger of someone who expects hypocrisy and refuses to be surprised by it.