Quotes About Envy

What is envy? It is nothing but passive jealousy. Maybe jealousy is too strong a phenomenon; envy is a little passive. The difference may be of degrees, but it is not of quality, it is only of quantity. Envy can become jealousy at any moment; envy is just jealousy in progress. Mind has to drop all envies and jealousies.

Greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies.

We are the wise. Do not envy us— We who are too wise to draw near the fire Lest we get burned; We who are too wise to love Lest love should vanish and we be hurt. We are the wise. Do not envy us our wisdom— We who are too wise to live Lest we should die.

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

At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone.

In short, virtue cannot live where envy reigns, nor liberality subsist with niggardliness.

I've noticed that, while I can't help but respect and sort of envy the moral nerve of people who truly do not care what others think of them, people like this also make me nervous, and I tend to do my admiring from a safe distance.

Where is your heart? Is your heart with God? Is it with your own ego or your lust? Is it with your greed, your pride, envy, or your resentment? This is a time where you can go into yourself and ask: Where is my heart? Ramadan is a time to give the heart back to the One who possesses the hearts.

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

God's truth judges created things out of love, and Satan's truth judges them out of envy and hatred.

Ambition is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague, the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the original of vices, the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, turning medicines into maladies, and remedies into diseases.

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. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Envy is one of the great enemies of active spirituality. It keeps us from loving our neighbours, from functioning with others in community, and from affirming people's unique worth. It also steals contentment from the heart. Is there anything or anyone you are envious of?

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.

We envy those whose possessions or achievements are a reflection on our own. They are our neighbors and equals. It is they, above all who make plain the nature of our failure.

Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.

As an introvert, you can be your own best friend or your worst enemy. The good news is we generally like our own company, a quality that extroverts often envy. We find comfort in solitude and know how to soothe ourselves. Even our willingness to look at ourselves critically is often helpful.But, we can go too far. We can hoard responsibility and overlook the role others play. We can kick ourselves when we're down. How many times have you felt lousy about something, only to get mad at yourself for feeling lousy?

I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.

In proportion to the love existing among men, so will be the community of property and power. Among true and real friends, all is common; and, were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friends. The only perfect and genuine republic is that which comprehends every living being. Those distinctions which have been artificially set up, of nations, societies, families, and religions, are only general names, expressing the abhorrence and contempt with which men blindly consider their fellowmen.

In reading Ameen Rihani... I seem to have become absorbed to the point of forgetting my prejudice... and my envy of Mr. Rihani because he was permitted to enter many remote parts of Arabia which were barred to others.

I think it's dangerous to think you know what you're writing. I usually don't know, and usually I just discover it in the course of writing. I envy those writers who can outline a beginning, a middle, and end. Fitzgerald supposedly did it. John Irving does. Bret Easton Ellis does. But for me, the writing itself is the process of discovery. I can't see all that far ahead.

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.

Envy, the meanest of vices, creeps on the ground like a serpent.

My wife, my Mary, goes to her sleep the way you would close the door of a closet. So many times I have watched her with envy. Her lovely body squirms a moment as though she fitted herself into a cocoon. She sighs once and at the end of it her eyes close and her lips, untroubled, fall into that wise and remote smile of the Ancient Greek gods. She smiles all night in her sleep, her breath purrs in her throat, not a snore, a kitten's purr... She loves to sleep and sleep welcomes her.

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.

A human doesn't have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

God being infinite beauty, the soul united to Christ draws upon himself the admiring and tender gaze of the Angels, who, were they capable of any passion, would be filled with envy at his lot.

It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.

Envy is an ill-natured vice, and is made up of meanness and malice. It wishes the force of goodness to be strained, and the measure of happiness abated. It laments over prosperity, and sickens at the sight of health. It oftentimes wants spirit as well as good nature.

I have these huge, pointed ears. They're like three times the size of Orlando Bloom's ears. And I think he has ear envy, I love my ears.

Nonetheless, do I have respect for people who believe in the hereafter? Of course I do. I might add, perhaps even a touch of envy too, because of the solace.

All of us are prone to excuse our own mediocre performance. We blame our misfortunes, our disfigurements, our so-called handicaps. Victims of our own rationalization, we say silently to ourselves, 'I'm just too weak,' or 'I'm not cut out for better things.' Others soar beyond our meager accomplishments. Envy and discouragement take their toll. .

Drop jealousy and envy, for they make you ugly. Be loving, be accepting, and most of all... be happy just the way you are.

The only thing I envy about a cat is its purr," remarked Dr. Blythe once, listening to Doc's resonant melody. "It is the most contented sound in the world.

Adolescents swing from euphoric self-confidence and a kind of narcissistic strength in which they feel invulnerable and even immortal, to despair, self-emptiness, self-deprecation. At the same time they seem to see an emerging self that is unique and wonderful, they suffer an intense envy which tears narcissism into shreds, and makes other people's qualities hit them like an attack of lasers.

It's said that prayer can move mountains. Well, it's certainly moved the hearts and minds of Americans in their times of trial and helped them to achieve a society that, for all its imperfections, is still the envy of the world and the last, best hope of mankind.

The sure mark of one born with noble qualities is being born without envy.

We are told to walk noiselessly through the world, that we may waken neither hatred, nor envy; but, alas! what can we do when they never sleep!

My tattoo is of a cannon in Vancouver that I got in a fleeting moment of stupidity maybe 14 years ago. A lot of people have really beautiful tattoos, and I get real tattoo envy. But then other people basically just treat them like bumper stickers for their bodies.

... the introduction of the doctrine of polygamy was the first time in my life that I desired the grave, and I could hardly get over it for a long time. And when I saw a funeral, I felt to envy the corpse its situation.

Ambition hath but two steps: the lowest, blood; the highest, envy.

The least glimmering or shade of acting, in man or woman, is a sure motive of envy in the rest; and, if their malice can't persuade the town's-people into a dislike of their performance, they'll cruelly endeavor to taint their characters.

Envy is what makes you, when an acquaintance is lustily telling you that she's dating a Greek god of a guy, ask, 'Which one, Hades?'

Sympathy is what you have for someone after they die, pity you have for someone when they don't have a date to the biggest dance of the year. Empathy is what I do to you when you judge me. Envy is having pity on yourself. Can you discern the rest for yourself?

What is evil? Killing is evil, lying is evil, slandering is evil, abuse is evil, gossip is evil, envy is evil, hatred is evil, to cling to false doctrine is evil; all these things are evil. And what is the root of evil? Desire is the root of evil, illusion is the root of evil.

Yet the people, and even the clergy, incapable of forming any rational judgment of the business of peace and war, presumed to arraign the policy of Stilicho, who so often vanquished, so often surrounded, and so often dismissed the implacable enemy of the republic. The first moment of the public safety is devoted to gratitude and joy; but the second is diligently occupied by envy and calumny.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.