Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas takes a term most moralists treat as suspicious - self-love - and rescues it with a single qualifier: "well-ordered". The intent is surgical. He is not blessing narcissism or appetite; he is defending the idea that caring about your own flourishing can be morally legitimate when it is aligned with a proper hierarchy of goods. In the medieval Christian imagination, "order" is not a vibe. It is metaphysics: everything has a purpose, and virtue is the art of placing desires in their right rank.

The subtext is a rebuke to two temptations that still feel modern. One is pious self-erasure: the performance of sanctity through self-neglect, as if holiness requires hating your own needs. Aquinas quietly refuses that drama. If you are a creature made for the good, then seeking your good is "natural", not a guilty pleasure. The other temptation is self-love unmoored from any larger end - the ego as a private kingdom. "Well-ordered" implies limits, discipline, and direction: love of self that does not compete with love of God and neighbor but supports it, like a body kept healthy so it can work.

Context matters. Aquinas is writing within an Aristotelian framework baptized into Christian theology, where nature is not the enemy of grace but its starting point. The line functions as a moral pressure valve: it legitimizes self-care while denying it sovereignty. In an age that oscillates between hustle-culture self-optimization and therapeutic self-absorption, Aquinas offers a harsher, more bracing standard: your self-love is only as good as the order it serves.