Do you believe this quote is true?

It is just nonsense. An illogical statement that at first glance seems true, or has a suspicion of being very profound, but actually isn’t. It’s a deepism.

Like ‘love is just a word’.

Cheap nonsense.

I don’t really get it to be honest. I definitely do not love myself, but I would never hurt another person, because I know what it is to hurt.

It doesn’t make any sense. The first thing has nothing to do with the second thing. It’s like saying If I like Fig Newtons, then everybody will stop using credit cards.

Maybe a better analogy (with a quote that comes closer to equating these two statements which do not depend upon each other, although some people might want them to depend upon each other) would be this If I like Fig Newtons, and I give everybody in the world some of these cookies, everyone will like me.

The first statement has 2 things that are clearly un-related, whereas the second example gives some statements that may or may not be related, but the first thing doesn’t cause the second thing in any of the 3 examples (including the original statement in the OP)

It’s a clumsy paraphrase of a statement attributed to the Buddha, so it has to be understood from a Buddhist perspective.

First, remember that a key tenet of Buddhism is that what you commonly think of as your self is an illusion. We typically imagine that this self is an independent being that is fundamentally separate and different from other beings. In this way of looking at things, there’s “me” and “others”. If you take that as who you really are, then you can love yourself a lot, and still not give a shit about others.

But the Buddha taught that every single being is densely interconnected with every other being, so much so that it’s nonsensical to think in terms of “self” and “other”. The very idea of harming someone else comes from thinking that that “someone else” is not “me”. But understanding how closely linked we all are changes that basic premise. It means that I can’t love “me” and hate “you” any more than I can love my right hand, but want to harm my left.

It’s not hard to understand a statement like “If you truly loved yourself, you would never harm your left hand”. All the Buddha was pointing out is that if you understood how connected you are to all other beings, then you wouldn’t assume that you end at the boundary of your skin, and there could be no distinction between loving yourself and loving others.

That’s a reversal of the statement, @Headhurts. It doesn’t say “If you wouldn’t hurt another person, it must be because you love yourself.” It says “A person who loves himself or herself won’t hurt another person.” And that doesn’t have to mean “ONLY a person who loves himself or herself won’t hurt another person.”

My first reaction was to think of someone who loved her/himself so much she/he was totally unconcerned with anyone else; therefore indifferent to hurting anyone. I think the problem with this statement is the many interpretations of the word love. If it’s is determined by Buddhism, it would take that particular perspective to understand it.
I don’t think I do.

A person with narcissist personality disorder mixed in with a bit of anti-social tendencies is the perfect mix for a murderer. Just sayin’...

And I should of course not have called it a deepism…. I was thinking of a deepity.

Still that is an interesting concept, see here (wiki page).

BS!

That’s just a silly quote someone made up to try to get someone to feel guilty about something.

Love Stems from Self…

If one understand Self, then of course, he gains the understanding of Love.

Also when he understands Self, he also gains understanding of another.
Because Self and Another is intrinsically the Same.
As in I and its own reflection You.

So therefore Loving (understanding) Self could only result in Loving Another.

If garbage flows from your pie hole, then you must expect the birds to hover overhead.

It sounds like something that would be an animated and glitterized .gif on a MySpace page. Or tattooed on the arm of a mopey white girl who has “Beutiful (sic) Disaster” tattooed on the other.

I think @thorninmud says it best “If you truly loved yourself, you would never harm your left hand”.

Now, I have to get that tattoo. It brings up all sorts of images of self-love

No

Anyway, to answer the question, no, I don’t think it’s particularly meaningful as written, nor do I think there’s any way to determine the truth of it, unless you interpret it as @thorninmud says.

What’s the difference between “if you loved yourself” and “if you truly loved yourself”? Somehow this brings to mind the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy.

^^ Kind of like This

I love love love @whitenoise‘s “deepism”. Did you coin that? It’s a fantastic derisive term, and FSM knows we need more of them. (Really.)

I agree with the “nonsense” crowd. I guess I love myself – though I would never say so in so many words – but I know my worth, and my limitations and failings, too, and I’m okay with that. With all of that.

But if I had to, I could kill. I can turn my own cheek fine, and have done so many times. But the conditions could be met that would mandate my turn to violence, in a heartbeat.

This may be somewhat tangential but it reminds me that it is only when we love ourselves that we can truly love others. As for your quote, it is probably the sort of thing I might have believed when I was 17 but years on from that I’m afraid it sounds hollow and glib to me.

Often in relationships people who have low self-esteem (particularly, men) will hurt their partners.

@CWOTUS,

No I didn’t coin the deepism term, I wish… I was actually thinking of deepity, a term employed by Daniel Dennett in his 2009 speech to the American Atheists Institution conference, coined by the teenage daughter of one of his friends.

In general, a deepity has (at least) two meanings; one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound, but is essentially false or meaningless and would be “earth-shattering” if true.

“If you truly loved yourself, you would never harm another.”
I would think that it means that IF you hurt another knowingly, then you hurt yourself too.
( as it would affect ones emotions,conscience in the end as it always comes back to haunt one).
I guess the term knowingly makes the difference here as at times many of us hurt another but not consciously, nor on purpose.

Yes.
If you truly love yourself,it means that you are capable of seeing others in their shoes.so you will love them like you love yourself,so you would not harm them. but this kind of love is very rare to come by.

I think it has a core of true and useful wisdom.

I also think that it seems logically not always true, if one interprets the words in certain literal ways that aren’t what I expect the expression means. For example, one might react to it by considering that one might find oneself unexpectedly needing to defend oneself, and think that the self-defense might count as hurting someone else. But I think that’s not really the context the statement is intended for, or if it is, it’s intended for a very high level of enlightenment.