Quotes About Envy

For all the unkind things said about envy, it would only be fair to acknowledge that not all envy is destructive. If envy leads us to work hard and to improve our skills, it becomes a stimulant to self-improvement. God has given us no quality that cannot be used for good.

Envy is more irreconcilable than hate. It is the most corroding of all political vices and also a great power in our land. The friends of freedom are content to be envied, but envy not.

I do not envy a clergyman's life as an easy life, nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life.

What is freedom? It consists in two things: to know each his own limitations and accept them - that is the same thing as to know oneself, and accept oneself as one is, without fear, or envy, or distaste; and to recognise and accept the conditions under which one lives, also without fear or envy, or distaste. When you do this, you shall be free.

I envy my dad and his faith. I envy all people who have someone to beseech, who know where they're going, who sleep under the fluffy white comforter of belief.

I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him agesof education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.

Money matters but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

As an amateur, you may envy the professional, wishing you could combine business with pleasure into a kind of full-time hobby, using professional equipment and facilities. However, the professional knows that much of the hidden advantage of being amateur is the freedom you have to shoot what and when you like.

We like the idea of childhood but are not always crazy about the kids we know. We like it, that is, when we are imagining our ownchildhoods. So part of our apparent appreciation of youth is simply envy.

The mind is the source of happiness and unhappiness by what it chooses to compare the experience with. If it chooses to compare it to something worse then it will create happiness, gratitude and pride but if it chooses to compare it to something better then it will create unhappiness, bitterness and envy.

Man's envy is at its most intense where all are almost equal; his calls for redistribution are loudest when there is virtually nothing to redistribute.

My daughter takes pride in showing up with stuff that other kids envy or are freaked out by, so I send her to school with grilled octopus.

We envy others, for we see their lives in broad outline, while forced to live ours in every detail.

We're all one thing, like cells in a body. 'Cept we can't see the body. The way fish can't see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell.

I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.

A note of caution: We can never achieve goals that envy sets for us. Looking at your friends and wishing you had what they had is a waste of precious energy. Because we are all unique, what makes another happy may do the opposite for you. That's why advice is nice but often disappointing when heeded.

All the vices, Sancho, bring some kind of pleasure with them; but envy brings nothing but irritation, bitterness, and rage.

I envy drummers. It must be the ultimate to sing and play drums at the same time. Phil Collins, no wonder he's so f... happy.

I have performed my duty to my God, my country, and my family. I have nothing to fear in approaching death. To me it is the mere shadow of God's protecting wing . . . Here I will rest in quiet and peace beyond the reach of calumny's poisoned shaft, the influence of envy and jealous enemies, where treason and traitors or State backsliders and hypocrites in church can have no peace.

We seek our happiness outside ourselves, and in the opinion of men we know to be flatterers, insincere, unjust, full of envy, caprice and prejudice.

Envy is destroyed by true friendship, as coquetry by true love.

No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.

As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

The native American has been generally despised by his white conquerors for his poverty and simplicity. They forget, perhaps, that his religion forbade the accumulation of wealth and the enjoyment of luxury... Furthermore, it was the rule of his life to share the fruits of his skill and success with his less fortunate brothers. Thus he kept his spirit free from the clog of pride, cupidity, or envy, and carried out, as he believed, the divine decree-a matter profoundly important to him.

Envy's a coal comes hissing hot from Hell.

There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair

My brother, are war and battle evil? Necessary, however, is the evil; necessary are the envy and the distrust and the back-biting among the virtues.

I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness, glad of other men's good, content with my harm.

The way the left is reacting to the death of Fidel Castro up against the incontrovertible facts of who he was, you want to talk about a disconnect. In fact, I don't think it is a disconnect. I think the left, the power brokers, the leaders, I think they actually did admire the guy. I think this is what they think Castro's power - I've always said, the people have asked me, how do these actors and people and these leftist politicians, how come they admire people like this? I said, "They envy their power." And I think there may be a lot to that.

I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.

The national Democratic leadership is going so far left, they've left America. Don't let them bury the American dream in their graveyard of gloom and envy.

I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.

If we are the younger, we may envy the older. If we are the older, we may feel that the younger is always being indulged. In otherwords, no matter what position we hold in family order of birth, we can prove beyond a doubt that we're being gypped.

Jealousy, which serves the struggle for survival, can deteriorate into the envy which draws defeat even from victory.

Envy and jealousy are very harmful because you are never ever satisfied with what you have and you never reflect on what you have. You constantly live your life on what you do not have.

Envy is always referred to by its political alias, 'social justice.

You campaigned against rich people and you got enough envy whipped up in the country and you're gonna get 'em. You're gonna stick it to those rich people. But guess what? You may not get anymore revenue. You may not get anymore economic growth. But you can say, 'I stuck it to the rich people.'

If you're in a subordinate position of some sort and pretty much all of us are at some point in our lives, your general tendency is to try and impress the people above you or person above you so well that they will like you, keep you or maybe promote you. In the process of doing that you are not aware that that person above has insecurities and if you try so hard they may see that you are after their job or that you are better than they are or they might envy the fact you are younger.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

What is the use of acquiring one's heart's desire if one cannot handle and gloat over it, show it to one's friends, and gather an anthology of envy and admiration?

Here's a practice for dealing with envy...each time you find yourself envious of someone...ask yourself, "What is there that I am noticing in the other person that I want to find in myself?"...If it's money, is it the freedom? The cance to play that money buys? A sense of security? Whatever it is-more play, a sense of security, free time-you can work on getting more of it in your life, no matter what the circumstances.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

The man who keeps busy helping the man below him won't have time to envy the man above him.

Jealousy is in a manner just and reasonable, as it tends to preserve a good which belongs, or which we believe belongs to us, on the other hand envy is a fury which cannot endure the happiness of others.

The cheap but simple human emotion of envy is the driving force of all socialism, of all anti-capitalist philosophy. It is the mark of the intellectual.

A nonviolent occupation is that occupation which is fundamentally free from violence and which involves no exploitation or envy of others.

The yearning after equality [in economic outcome] is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.

Moderation is caused by the fear of exciting the envy and contempt which those merit who are intoxicated with their good fortune; it is a vain display of our strength of mind, and in short the moderation of men at their greatest height is only a desire to appear greater than their fortune.