If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.

Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort (1741–1794) was a French moralist and aphorist whose sharp maxims circulated in salons and, later, in print. The line is typically associated with his posthumously published collections of pensées and maxims, compiled from notebooks and conversations during the late Ancien Régime and the early French Revolution. Chamfort’s writing often turns conventional moral or religious injunctions into paradoxes that expose hypocrisy and social coercion. This remark plays on the Christian commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” recasting it as a defense of self-regard against moralizing demands for self-sacrifice.

Chamfort’s aphorism reverses a familiar ethical formula to argue that self-love is not automatically suspect. If morality uses the self as the measure of how one ought to treat others (“as yourself”), then the self must be granted equal moral standing: it is “fair” to extend to oneself the same care, patience, and protection one is urged to offer a neighbor. The wit lies in exposing how moral rhetoric can be asymmetrical—pressuring individuals to give endlessly while treating self-interest as shameful. Chamfort is not necessarily endorsing selfishness; rather, he insists on reciprocity and on the legitimacy of self-respect as a precondition for genuine benevolence.