: Is the sentence "Love not self - love no one" easily understandable to an English reader? This question is not about syntactical correctness. I do not care about that. The only thing I care

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This sounds incredibly unnatural, almost to the point of comedy. It reads like something that's been very badly translated. There are just not enough words in the sentences to make the meaning clear.

Syntactical correctness is not just a little annoying hurdle to be overcome; it's incredibly important to the ability to make your meaning clear. This question would, in fact, be better posed to ELL.

In general, I would not recommend in any writing situation to try and break the rules before you fully understand them.

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It is open to interpretation, so not clear. Love not self sounds like a warning against narcissistic tendencies or a call to be selfless as self is merely an illusion so love of self would be a waste.

Sentences should not require explication. What you might want to try is adding the missing concept. “Without love of self one cannot love others”

“Love not self - love no one” sounds negative. It implies that love is something to be avoided.

The sentiment is similar to what Emerson said regarding beauty, that to find it elsewhere we must carry it within ourselves (poor paraphrase).

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From a structure point of view, you're making it far too short to be easily understandable by a reader.

“Love not self - love no one”

It sounds more like a commandment to live by rather than a causal implication.
The fact that verbs are in their root forms makes the sentence look like an imperative statement: there will be people that, without any given context, will read said words as: "You shouldn't love yourself, nor love anyone else"

Depending on the context it could also feel like someone criticizing someone else: "You don't love yourself, you don't love at all".

Of course a part of the readers will (eventually) derive the intended meaning of "If you don't love yourself, you can't love anyone". But you're omitting a lot of the important bits of the sentence.

So:

Yes, it sounds unnatural.

You should focus on making it less synthetical to improve readability.

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