Envy quotes
878 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside envy — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything."
"It is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy."
"Not praising the deserving prevents envy."
"That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own."
"Unjust criticism is usually disguised compliment. It often means that you have aroused jealously and envy. Remember that no one ever kicks a dead log."
"The tyranny imposed on the soul by anger, or fear, or lust, or pain, or envy, or desire, I generally call 'injustice.'"
"Envy creates the beginning of strife."
"Those who raise envy will easily incur censure."
"With that malignant envy which turns pale, And sickens, even if a friend prevail."
"We have a higher percentage of the intelligentsia engaged in buying and selling pieces of paper and promoting trading activity than in any past era. A lot of what I see now reminds me of Sodomand Gomorrah. You get activity feeding on itself, envy and imitation. It has happened in the past that there came bad consequences."
"Harvard and Yale concentrated with venture capitalists that got the best calls and brainpower. Very few firms made most of the money, and they made it in just a few periods. Everyone else returned between mediocre and lousy. When returns happened, envy rippled through institutional money management. The amount invested in venture capital went up 10 times post-1999. That later money was lost very quickly. It will happen again. I don't know anyone who successfully resists this stuff. It becomes a new orthodoxy."
"Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay."
"Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy."
"All envy is proportionate to desire; we are uneasy at the attainments of another, according as we think our own happiness would be advanced by the addition of that which he withholds from us."
"The sure mark of one born with noble qualities is being born without envy."
"Envy is destroyed by true friendship, as coquetry by true love."
"Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead."
"I like to walk, touch living Mother Earth—bare feet best, and thrill every step. Used to envy happy reptiles that had advantage of so much body in contact with earth, bosom to bosom. [We] live with our heels as well as head and most of our pleasure comes in that way."
"There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue."
"There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair"
