Envy Quotes - Page 22

• Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Struggle, Class, Our World

  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture in literature delivered only to the Swedish Academy, www.nobelprize.org. 1970.

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• Do not envy others. If someone gets a larger piece of cake, be happy for them. They'll get fat and you'll stay thin.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Buddhism, Cake

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• It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over.

  Matt Ridley

  Dream, Lying, Book

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• To claim "humanitarian motives" when the motive is envy and its supposed appeasement, is a favorite rhetorical device of politicians today, and has been for at least a hundred and fifty years.

  Helmut Schoeck

  Years, Atheism, Fifty

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• Christianity provided man for the first time with supernatural beings who, he knew, could neither envy nor ridicule him.

  Helmut Schoeck

  Men, Supernatural Beings, Atheism

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• ... 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.

  Brigham Young

  Long, Funeral, Doctrine

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• To our betters eve can reconcile ourselves, if you please--respecting them sincerely, laughing at their jokes, making allowance for their stupidities, meekly suffering their insolence; but we can't pardon our equals going beyond us.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Laughing, Stupidity, Suffering

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• Envy is not to be conquered but by death.

  Horace

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• Who loves the golden mean is safe from the poverty of a tenement, is free from the envy of a palace.
  [Lat., Auream quisquis mediocritatem deligit tutus caret obsoleti sordibus tecti, caret invidenda sobrius aula.]

  Horace

  Mean, Tutus, Safe

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• Had the crow only fed without cawing she would have had more to eat, and much less of strife and envy to contend with. [To noise abroad our success is to invite envy and competition.]

  Horace

  Competition, Crow, Noise

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• I've given parties that have made Indian rajahs green with envy. I've had prima donnas break $10,000 engagements to come to my smallest dinners. When you were still playing button back in Ohio, I entertained on a cruising trip that was so much fun that I had to sink my yacht to make my guests go home.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Fun, Party, Home

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2009). “The Crack-Up”, p.171, New Directions Publishing

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• Ill-humor is nothing more than an inward feeling of our own want of merit, a dissatisfaction with ourselves which is always united with an envy that foolish vanity excites.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Vanity, Feelings, Inward

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• It is often found that modesty and humility not only do no good, but are positively hurtful, when they are shown to the arrogant who have taken up a prejudice against you, either from envy or from any other cause.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Taken, Humility, Hurtful

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• That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.

  Jonathan Swift

  Common, Incessant, Mankind

  Jonathan Swift (1861). “The Works of Jonathan Swift ...: With Copious Notes and Additions, and a Memoir of the Author”, p.327

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• Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.

  Margaret Halsey

  Adults, Degrees, Jerusalem

  Margaret Halsey (1944). “...Some of My Best Friends are Soldiers: A Kind of Novel”

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• A competitive society is a society of envy.

  Dorothee Solle

  Competition

  Dorothee Sölle (1983). “The arms race kills even without war”, Augsburg Fortress Publishers

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• I don't believe that there is a human creature in his senses, arrived to maturity, that at some time or other has not been carried away by this passion (sc. envy) in good earnest; yet I never met with any one who dared own he was guilty of it but in jest.

  Bernard de Mandeville

  Believe, Passion, Maturity

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• Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living.

  Henry Fuseli

  Vampire, Emulation, Blast

  Henry Fuseli (1831). “Lectures. Aphorisms. A history of art in the schools of Italy”, p.140

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• When I was young they used to say people only threw stones at the tree that was loaded with fruit.

  Rachel Field

  Jealousy, People, Tree

  Rachel Field (1938). “ALL THIS, and HEAVEN TOO”

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• Every time you envy someone you use a muscle in your face to disadvantage. If you do it only once or twice, it can be erased. But over a period of years, those muscles will tighten your mouth, narrow your eyes, and help destroy your attractiveness.

  Arlene Dahl

  Eye, Years, Mouths

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• When is enough enough? In envy's eyes, enough never is. Somebody else always has something we want.

  Nancy Friday

  Eye, Want, Enough

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• We are savages insides. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed. There isn't a person reading this who hasn't at one point or another had that why not me? voice pop into the interior mix when something good has happened to someone else.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Reading, Voice, Savages

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.185, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Unsuccessful emulation is too apt to sink into envy, which of all sins has not even the excuse to offer of temporary gratification.

  Sydney Thompson Dobell

  Emulation, Sin, Excuse

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• The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.

  Bonnie Friedman

  Work, Thinking, Answers

  Bonnie Friedman (2014). “Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• Envy is one of the scorpions of the mind, often having little to do with the objective, external world.

  Bonnie Friedman

  Mind, Scorpions, World

  Bonnie Friedman (2014). “Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life”, p.3, Harper Collins

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