quotations about envy
Envy is a gun with a faulty breech-lock which flares back and burns the gunner.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Envy is like farts. Everyone suffers from it. But, if you let it out ... you don't smell very nice.
NINA RAINE
Rabbit
For envy is a gadding passion, and walketh the streets, and doth not keep home.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Envy generally admires and abhors out of proportion.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Covetousness, which is idolatry.
BIBLE
Colossians 3:5
Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another's prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
If envy, like anger, did not burn itself in its own fire, and consume and destroy those persons it possesses, before it can destroy those it wishes worst to, it would set the whole world on fire, and leave the most excellent persons the most miserable.
EARL OF CLARENDON
attributed, Day's Collacon
If envy would burn, there would be no need for wood.
SERBIAN PROVERB
Our envy always outlives the felicity of its object.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Moral Maxims
Envy ... feeds on outcast entrails like a kite;
In which foul heap, if any ill lies hid,
She sticks her beak into it, shakes it up,
And hurls it all abroad, that all may view it.
Corruption is her nutriment; but touch her
With any precious ointment, and you kill her:
Where she finds any filth in men, she feasts,
And with her black throat bruits it through the world
Being sound and healthful; but if she but taste
The slenderest pittance of commended virtue,
She surfeits of it, and is like a fly
That passes all the body's soundest parts,
And dwells upon the sores; or if her squint eye
Have power to find none there, she forges some:
She makes that crooked ever which is straight;
Calls valour giddiness, justice tyranny;
A wise man may shun her, she not herself:
Whithersoever she flies from her harms,
She bears her foe still clasp'd in her own arms;
And therefore ... let us avoid her.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
Bussy D'Ambois
If envy were a ringworm, we would all have scabs.
MEXICAN PROVERB
There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale.
ANNA GODBERSON
The Luxe
Envy like fire always makes for the highest points.
LIVY
Annales
Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
Envy was a treasure-hoarding dragon, dainty and diabolical.
HOLLY CUPALA
Tell Me a Secret
Envy, like a false mirror, distorts the symmetry of the sweetest form.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
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 HAZLITT
Characteristics
Envy ought in strict truth to have no place whatever allowed it in the heart of man; for the goods of this present world, are so vile and low, that they are beneath it; and those of the future world, are so vast and exalted, that they are above it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Few men have the natural strength to honour a friend's success without envy.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
Envy follows worth as a shadow follows a body.
SPANISH PROVERB