Beyond a certain limit, self-love is a spiritual disease. Taken to the highest degree, it manifests as the spiritual disease known as megalomania.
People think that self-denial violates freedom. Such people do not know that it is only self-denial that can give us true freedom, liberating us from our own selves, from the slavery of our depravity. Our passions are our most vicious tyrants; the instant you give them ground you will find yourself in pitiless slavery, powerless to take a single free breath. Only self-denial liberates us from this slavery.
— Fénelon
Self-love is only necessary for the preservation of the individual life of the body, and when it manifests within these limits, it is natural and just. However, when reason, whose natural purpose is to destroy all separateness, is instead used to assert this separateness, self-love becomes harmful and painful.
A life of complete self-denial is divine, a life of uninterrupted self-love is lower than that of an animal. Rational human life is a gradual transition from animal to divine life.
Impartiality is as rare as justice. Self-interest is an inexhaustible source of self-delusions for self-justification. The number of people who want to see the truth is extremely small. People are ruled by a fear of the truth, unless that truth is useful to them. People of a worldly philosophy view truth as something that may either be allowed or disallowed in life. And that is how the prejudice of self-love defends all the prejudices of thought that flow from this egotistic ruse. Humankind desires only one type of progress: an increase in pleasure. Self-sacrifice—a pleasure of great souls—has never been the law of society.
— Amiel
Pleasure-seeking and self-satisfied thinkers and artists do not exist. Self-denial, the willingness to sacrifice yourself in order to manifest the power within you for the benefit of others, is the only sure mark of a calling. Spiritual fruits do not grow without suffering.
To teach how many bugs there are in the world, to examine the spots on the sun, to write novels and operas—all this can be done with selfish goals, but to teach people of their good, which involves both self-denial and serving others, and to find powerful ways to express this teaching, cannot be done without self-denial.
Christ did not die on the cross in vain, and it is not in vain that the sacrifice of suffering conquers all.
The difficulty of the necessary liberation of the self from self-love lies in the fact that self-love is a necessary condition of life. It is necessary and natural in childhood, but it must grow weaker and be gradually destroyed as reason develops and, most important, as true love manifests itself. A child does not feel the reproaches of conscience for his self-love but, as reason develops and love manifests itself, self-love grows weaker and weaker, and, by the time death draws near, it must be completely destroyed.
