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Quotes about envy

25 quotes from 22 people

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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
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
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)
Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.
Josh Billings1818–1885
- Love
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
I am Envy. I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.
Christopher Marlowe1564–1593
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