“To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.”

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Source: Brain Droppings

Act I, sc. i.
The Critic (1779)

Source: "Susan Sontag Finds Romance," interview by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)

Source: The Fall Into Time (1964), p. 178, first American edition (1970)

1900s, A Square Deal (1903)
Context: The average American knows not only that he himself intends to do what is right, but that his average fellow countryman has the same intention and the same power to make his intention effective. He knows, whether he be business man, professional man, farmer, mechanic, employer, or wage-worker, that the welfare of each of these men is bound up with the welfare of all the others; that each is neighbor to the other, is actuated by the same hopes and fears, has fundamentally the same ideals, and that all alike have much the same virtues and the same faults. Our average fellow citizen is a sane and healthy man who believes in decency and has a wholesome mind. He therefore feels an equal scorn alike for the man of wealth guilty of the mean and base spirit of [arrogance]] toward those who are less well off, and for the man of small means who in his turn either feels, or seeks to excite in others the feeling of mean and base envy for those who are better off. The two feelings, envy and arrogance, are but opposite sides of the same shield, but different developments of the same spirit.

Source: To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Address in Des Moines, Iowa (4 November 1910)
1910s

Chap. 10 : Beware the Fragile Ego
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)