Envy Quotes

“The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Insecure people put others down to raise themselves up.”
― Habeeb Akande

“What kind of plan B?" Hale asked. He was almost holding his breath when a voice answered, "My kind." Macey tried to read the look on his face then, but it was gone in a flash. It had been a simple moment of peace and joy and pure happiness. That voice made Hale happy. It kept him calm. It was his backup and his conscience. Macey couldn't help herself, she envied him.”
― Ally Carter, Double Crossed: A Spies and Thieves Story

“Learn to love your haters, they are a wonderful source of inspiration.”
― Habeeb Akande

“I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, and fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural . . to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Haters are those, that never were given any chances, that blew their chances, or that never took the chance.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Existential envy which is directed against the other person’s very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: “I can forgive everything, but not that you are— that you are what you are—that I am not what you are—indeed that I am not you.” This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a “pressure,” a “reproach,” and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe’s reflection that “against another’s great merits, there is no remedy but love.”
― Max Scheler

“Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling? The reason is clearly that the human heart as modern civilisation has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied, because it feels deply, perhaps even unconsciously, that it has somehow missed the meaning of life, that perhaps others, but not we ourselves, have secured the good things which nature offers man's enjoyment.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“People who hate you because of a mere jealousy over your success hurt themselves in disguise. This is because you carry an image of who they wish they had become. Don't hate them back because they may also become like you one day and it will mean hurting that image you carry!”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“Use your hater to make you greater!”
― Habeeb Akande

“Oui, c'est votre idée, à vous tous, les ouvriers français, déterrer un trésor, pour le manger seul ensuite, dans un coin d'égoïsme et de fainéantise. Vous avez beau crier contre les riches, le courage vous manque de rendre aux pauvres l'argent que la fortune vous envoie... Jamais vous ne serez dignes du bonheur, tant que vous aurez quelque chose à vous, et que votre haine des bourgeois viendra uniquement de votre besoin enragé d'être des bourgeois à leur place.”
― Émile Zola, Germinal

“I remember a relative of mine who used to pick on me all the time, constantly ridiculing my every move and making me feel inferior. One day she had a pimple on her face and was devastated. I told her "Why would you let a little thing like that bother you in such a way? It's just a pimple!" And she cried and said "You can say that, because you're perfect and even if you have ten pimples on your face, it wouldn't even matter!" And I never forgot how I felt in that moment, that moment taught me some important things! First, I realized that the whole time she was picking on me, she actually was feeling that I was perfect! And secondly, I realized that when people think you're perfect, they try to make you feel bad about yourself! I was so taken aback in those few minutes— I couldn't even say anything! I just looked at her while all my realizations flooded my mind and I decided that just because you think someone is perfect, doesn't give you the ticket to make them feel bad about themselves.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Rivalry discovers that courtesy overlooks.”
― Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle

“So many birds sitting around, on a dead wire, a bare branch, a cold ground, a drifting seashore; never realizing the glory in their wings and where it can take them, nor the envy as we look on them.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. . .Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism. . .the bacterium that infected. . . Yes. . .maybe he was sick.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts--and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about the opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English civil war, of French wines--I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?”
― Zadie Smith

“Envy yearns to find flaws.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Once she was standing by her locker and her puka shells broke and scattered and she made a joke about it but he could tell she was upset. He wanted to buy her some more. He wanted to give her a million strands of little nesting polished shells, and tropical flowers and ice creams and lemonades and a pale blue surfboard to teach her to surf on and anything else she wanted. Instead he let his checkered Vans step on one of the rolling shells and crush it.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Wasteland

“And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life. They will waste all their years, in order that they may have one year reckoned by their name.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“I've always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children's books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife's work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Marvel hates her because she's pretty and doesn't have any kids to worry about.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“The ultimate goal of the arriviste’s aspirations is not to acquire a thing of value, but to be more highly esteemed than others. He merely uses the “thing” as an indifferent occasion for overcoming the oppressive feeling of inferiority which results from his constant comparisons.”
― Max Scheler, Ressentiment

“Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

“Envy is a buzz killer."

~R. Alan Woods [2013]”
― R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is the Destination: A Book of Quotes With Commentaries

“Envy, is Pride's greatest Fear.”
― Anthony Liccione

“It does wonders for my own psyche to turn envy into inspiration. No matter how successful we become, we're never above that.”
― Hillman Curtis, Mtiv: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer

“Part of me wanted to be like the other guys at school. I wanted to be simple. People who do less thinking tend to be happier... I wanted to be like the other guys because they were having more fun. But I couldn't be like them because I hated everything they stood for.”
― J. Matthew Nespoli

“When the same qualities which we admire in ourselves are seen in others, even though they be superior, maliciously lower and carp at them.”
― John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 Vols

“If an American worker saw you driving a Cadillac, he worked to. earn enough to buy one for himself; the English worker, on the other hand, sought to deprive you of yours.”
― Elizabeth Powers