Lexic.us

Definition of Self-love

1. Noun. Feelings of excessive pride.

2. Noun. An exceptional interest in and admiration for yourself. "Self-love that shut out everyone else"

Definition of Self-love

1. Noun. Regard for oneself, love of oneself. ¹

2. Noun. Excessive pride or vanity, over valuing the self. ¹

¹ Source: wiktionary.com

Medical Definition of Self-love

1. The love of one's self; desire of personal happiness; tendency to seek one's own benefit or advantage. "Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul." (Pope) Synonym: Selfishness. Self-love, Selfishness. The term self-love is used in a twofold sense: 1. It denotes that longing for good or for well-being which actuates the breasts of all, entering into and characterising every special desire. In this sense it has no moral quality, being, from the nature of the case, neither good nor evil. 2. It is applied to a voluntary regard for the gratification of special desires. In this sense it is morally good or bad according as these desires are conformed to duty or opposed to it. Selfishness is always voluntary and always wrong, being that regard to our own interests, gratification, etc, which is sought or indulged at the expense, and to the injury, of others. "So long as self-love does not degenerate into selfishness, it is quite compatible with true benevolence." . "Not only is the phrase self-love used as synonymous with the desire of happiness, but it is often confounded with the word selfishness, which certainly, in strict propriety, denotes a very different disposition of mind." . Source: Websters Dictionary (01 Mar 1998)

Lexicographical Neighbors of Self-love

self-insurance self-interest self-involved self-justification self-justificatory self-kill self-killing self-knowledge self-learning self-life

self-limited self-limited disease self-loader self-loading self-locking self-love (current term) self-loving self-made self-mastery self-medication

self-medicator self-medicators self-metathesis self-mortification self-motivated self-moving self-murder self-officiated self-opinionated self-organisation

Literary usage of Self-love

Below you will find example usage of this term as found in modern and/or classical literature:

1. A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume (1874)
"If pleasure sole motive, what is the distinction of self-love ? is (a) an immediate impression of sense, or (&) a pleasure of pride, or (c) one of sympathy. ..."

2. British Moralists: Being Selections from Writers Principally of the by Lewis Amherst Selby-Bigge (1897)
"in its degree as just and morally good as any affection whatsoever, 200. no reason to wish self-love weaker in most men than it is, 201. ..."

3. Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-book Designed for the Use by Augustus Hopkins Strong (1907)
"( с ) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for ... To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he ..."

4. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century by Leslie Stephen (1902)
"According to other psychologists, self-love is the aggregate of all our ... If, he says, there were no passion but self-love, there could be no such thing ..."

5. The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and (1910)
"But has not self-love also, by Butler's own account, a similar authority, which may come ... This dualism of governing principles, conscience and self-love, ..."

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