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Quotes about envy

25 quotes from 22 people

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Such men as he be never at heart’s ease whiles they behold a greater than themselves, and therefore are they very dangerous.
William Shakespeare1564–1616Julius Caesar (1623), Julius Cæsar (1599), Act I, scene 2, line 208.In context
Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.
Josh Billings1818–1885
- Love
I am Envy. I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.
Christopher Marlowe1564–1593
When men are full of envy they disparage everything, whether it be good or bad.
Tacitus55–120
If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.
Leo Tolstoy1828–1910Path of Life (1909), p. 89
- Money
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
George Eliot1819–1880The Mill on the Floss (1860)In context
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy — I don’t disparage envy but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.1841–1935Holmes-Laski Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916—1935 (1953), Vol. 2, p. 942.
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love…
George Eliot1819–1880The Mill on the Floss (1860), Book I, ch. xIn context
- Anger
- Love
It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.
Aeschylus525–456 BCAgamemnon, lines 832–833
- Friendship
Jealousy. The person who hasn’t felt it cannot know how much it hurts, or imagine the madness committed in its name. (p368)
Isabel Allendeborn 1942Portrait in Sepia (2000)
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
William Hazlitt1778–1830Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims (1823), No. 19
- Justice
Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.
David Hume1711–1776A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 2: Of the passions, Part 1, Section 4
- Anger
Wherever good fortune enters, envy lays siege to the place and attacks it; and when it departs, sorrow and repentance remain behind.
Leonardo da Vinci1452–1519XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
- Luck
Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.
Theodore Roosevelt1858–1919Speech at Kennedy Plaza, Providence, Rhode Island (23 August 1902), Presidential Addresses and State Papers (1910), p. 103.
- Money
Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion.
Erich Fromm1900–1980The Art of Loving (1956)
- Love