This was the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ but when the commandment is rightly understood it also says the converse, ‘Thou shalt love thyself in the right way.’  If anyone, therefore, will not learn… to love himself in the right way, then neither can he love his neighbour; he may perhaps, as we say, ‘for life and death’ cling to one or several human beings, but this is by no means loving one’s neighbour. To love one’s self in the right way and to love one’s neighbour are absolutely analogous concepts, are at bottom one and the same.

~ Søren Kierkegaard, from Works of Love (1847)