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Quotes about envy

25 quotes from 22 people

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I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
Susan Sontag1933–2004“Susan Sontag Finds Romance,” interview by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)
- Comedy
Don’t be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable.
Susan Sontag1933–2004Death Kit (1967), p.73 [Page numbers per the Penguin Modern Classics 2009 Edition]
- Advice
“Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.”
Charles Dickens1812–1870A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book the Second: The Golden Thread, Chapter IXIn context
- Power
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it⁠—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Mark Twain1835–1910The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Chapter IIIn context
- Motivation & Goals
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
H. G. Wells1866–1946The War of the Worlds (1898), Book One: The Coming of the Martians, Chapter IIn context
- Intelligence
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
William Shakespeare1564–1616Othello (c. 1604), Act III, Scene III, spoken by IagoIn context
- Love
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Self-Reliance (1841)In context
- Education
How can any man, whose eyes
Are wholesome, seek to rear his children wise
Beyond men’s wont? Much helplessness in arts
Of common life, and in their townsmen’s hearts
Envy deep-set … so much their learning brings!
Come unto fools with knowledge of new things,
They deem it vanity, not knowledge.
Euripides481–407 BCMedea (431 BC), Part 1, spoken by MedeaIn context
- Intelligence
- Knowledge
The Grapes are sour, and not ripe as I thought.
Aesop620–564 BCAesop’s Fables (6th century BC), The Kites and the Swans – The Monkey and the DolphinIn context
When you’re famous you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does.
Marilyn Monroe1926–1962Comment on fame, quoted in Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress (1993) by Carl E. Rollyson, and in Symbolic Leaders: Public Dramas and Public Men (2006) by Orrin Edgar Klapp
- Fame