‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’, words which astoundingly occur already in the Old Testament.
One can love one’s neighbor less than one loves oneself; one is then the egoist, the racketeer, the capitalist, the bourgeois. and although one may accumulate money and power one does not of necessity have a joyful heart, and the best and most attractive pleasures of the soul are blocked.
Or one can love one’s neighbor more than oneself—then one is a poor devil, full of inferiority complexes, with a longing to love everything and still full of hate and torment towards oneself, living in a hell of which one lays the fire every day anew.
But the equilibrium of love, the capacity to love without being indebted to anyone, is the love of oneself which is not taken away from any other, this love of one’s neighbor which does no harm to the self.
I always have a hard time finding this quote on the Internet. Let's fix that.