Quotes about envy
page 2

“Envy was just the tax you paid on success.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Success

“Of all the disorders in the soul, envy is the only one no one confesses to.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Soul

“I'm loved by some, hated by many, envied by most, yet wanted by all. (Josiah)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Love, Hate

“They envy the distinction I have won; let them, therefore, envy my toils, my honesty, and the methods by which I gained it.”

Sallust (-86–-34 BC) Roman historian, politician

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”

John Berger book Ways of Seeing

Source: Ways of Seeing (1972), p. 148

Personality

“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

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

People, Feeling

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

Love, Beauty, History, Idea

“Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?”

Jack Finney book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again

Books, Feeling, Time, Reading

“If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Journal for Saturday, 27th November 1813; Quoted in Letters and Journals of Lord Byron by Thomas Moore (1830), Vol III, Chap. XVII, p. 208 http://books.google.com/books?id=nloLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA208

Wisdom, Fools

“I never wished I’d been a man. I always felt like a woman and wanted to be a woman. I wanted to be fulfilled professionally and personally, as a woman. There are some who might say I had penis envy, but I only had penis admiration.”

Bette Davis (1908–1989) film and television actress from the United States

Personality

“I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Memory, Rage

“Envying another man's happiness is madness; you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.”

André Gide book The Immoralist

Source: The Immoralist

Happiness, Madness

“Taste of metal on my tongue. Poison the color of envy-
I'm delirious, you're delicious, I'm deluded and delusional.
I'm lost without you. I need you.”

Cecily von Ziegesar (1970) American writer

Source: Would I Lie to You

Color

“I envied it; not the idea of having so much money that you could throw it away, but the thought of growing up in a world where someone cared so much about your happiness and so little about what you accomplished in life.”

Kelley Armstrong (1968) Canadian writer

Life, Money, Happiness, World

“I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)

People, World, Thinking

“A worthy man is bound to suffer malice and envy: a man grows in worth so long as he is envied.”

Gottfried von Straßburg book Tristan

Hazzen unde nîden
daz muoz der biderbe lîden.
der man der werdet al die vrist,
die wîle und er geniten ist.
Source: Tristan, Line 8395

Suffering

“A very bold political measure of Lycurgus is his redistribution of the land. For there was a dreadful inequality in this regard, the city was heavily burdened with indigent and helpless people, and wealth was wholly concentrated in the hands of a few. Determined, therefore, to banish insolence and envy and crime and luxury, and those yet more deep-seated and afflictive diseases of the state, poverty and wealth, he persuaded his fellow-citizens to make one parcel of all their territory and divide it up anew, and to live with one another on a basis of entire uniformity and equality in the means of subsistence, seeking preëminence through virtue alone, assured that there was no other difference or inequality between man and man than that which was established by blame for base actions and praise for good ones.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Lycurgus, sec. 8. The bolded phrase is often quoted in a paraphrase by Ugo Foscolo: "Wealth and poverty are the oldest and most deadly ailments of all republics" (Le ricchezze e la povertà sono le più antiche e mortali infermità delle repubbliche), Monitore Italiano, 5 February 1798.
Parallel Lives

People, Disease, Affliction, Wealth

“Many who have visited me in Washington in the past few months may have been surprised when I have told them that personally and because of my own daily contacts with all manner of difficult situations I am more concerned and less cheerful about international world conditions than about our immediate domestic prospects.
I say this to you not as a confirmed pessimist but as one who still hopes that envy, hatred and malice among Nations have reached their peak and will be succeeded by a new tide of peace and good-will.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Address at Chautauqua, New York (1936)

World, Peace, Hope, Past

“Our policy is not built on envy or hatred, but on liberty for the individual man or woman.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The Path To Power (1995)

“Some of these my brethren know what my feelings were at the time Joseph revealed the doctrine; I was not desirous of shrinking from any duty, nor of failing in the least to do as I was commanded, but it was the first time in my life that I had 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, and to regret that I was not in the coffin…”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 3:266 (Jul. 14, 1855)
1850s

Life, Feeling, Time

“My neighbour
doesn't want to be loved
as much as
he wants to be envied.”

Irving Layton (1912–2006) Romanian-born Canadian poet

Aphs.
The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)

Love

“Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest:
Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain;
And virtue sank the deeper in his breast:
Such profit he by envy could obtain.”

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516–1547) English Earl

"Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest", line 1

“Two years before the war the then Government of Lord Oxford was confronted with an epidemic of strikes. The quarrel of one trade became the quarrel of all. This was the sympathetic strike…In the hands of one set of leaders, it perhaps meant no more than obtaining influence to put pressure on employers to better the conditions of the men. But in the hands of others it became an engine to wage what was beginning to be called class warfare, and the general strike which first began to be talked about was to be the supreme instrument by which the whole community could be either starved or terrified into submission to the will of its promoters. There was a double attitude at work in the same movement: the old constitutional attitude…of negotiations, keeping promises made collectively, employing strikes where negotiations failed; and on the other hand the attempt to transform the whole of this great trade union organization into a machine for destroying the system of private enterprise, of substituting for it a system of universal State employment…What was to happen afterwards was never very clear. The only thing clear was the first necessity to smash up the existing system. This was a profound breach with the past, and in its origin it was from a foreign source, and, like all those foreign revolutionary instances, it has been very largely secretive and subterranean. This attitude towards agreements and contracts has been a departure from the British tradition of open and straight dealing. The propaganda is a propaganda of hatred and envy.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Chippenham (12 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 164-165.
1926

Men, War, Secret, Communication

“I'm going to have cute boobs 'til I'm 90, so there's that. I'll have the best boobs in the nursing home. I'll be the envy of all the ladies around the bridge table.”

Christina Applegate (1971) American actress

During an interview on Good Morning America about her recent mastectomy. (August 19, 2008)

Home

“You cannot build a great nation or brotherhood of man by spreading envy or hatred.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The Path To Power (1995)

“Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter IX, Section 82, p. 538

Way

“There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan The Critic

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

Passion, Heart

“Patience is the guardian of faith, the preserver of peace, the cherisher of love, the teacher of humility: Patience governs the flesh, strengthens the spirit, sweetens the temper, stifles anger, extinguishes envy, subdues pride; she bridles the tongue, refrains the hand, tramples upon temptations, endures persecutions, consummates martyrdom.”

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

Source: The Works of the Right Reverend George Horne, 1809, p. 303

Love, Peace, Faith, Teachers

“The House of Representatives, in some respects, I think, is the most peculiar assemblage in the world, and only a man who has had long experience there can fully know its idiosyncrasies. It is true we engage in fierce combat, we are often intense partisans, sometimes we are unfair, not infrequently unjust, brutal at times, and yet I venture to say that, taken as a whole, the House is sound at heart; nowhere else will you find such a ready appreciation of merit and character, in few gatherings of equal size is there so little jealousy and envy.
The House must be considerate of the feelings of its Members; there is a certain courtesy that has to be observed; a man may be voted a bore or shunned as a pest, and yet he must be accorded the rights to which he is entitled by virtue of being a representative of the people. On the other hand, a man may be universally popular, a good fellow, amusing and yet with these engaging qualities never get far. The men who have led the House, whose names have become a splendid tradition to their successors, have gained prominence not through luck or by mere accident. They have had ability, at least in some degree; but more than that, they have had character.”

Joseph Gurney Cannon (1836–1926) American politician

Quoted in L. White Busby, Uncle Joe Cannon: The Story of a Pioneer American (1937), p. 260

Men, People, World, Jealousy

“When one speaks of America, millions of Germans think of their relatives who either recently or long ago left their German homeland to seek their fortune in the “New World.” When someone succeeded in quickly making a lot of money in America, people said he had made his fortune. The result was that the “rich uncle” in America was envied and his nephews and nieces were encouraged to join the fortune-seeker. Seeking fortunes in America led to Germany losing people, and the American continent received many people whose contributions are particularly clear in the agricultural and technical fields. That these people and their descendants now give great help to the enemies of Germany in this Second World War is a tragic fact.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Der Stürmer, 1944

Money, War, People, World

“In 1894, historian Theodor Mommsen wrote that the root cause of the anti-Semitic ‘affliction’ was ‘envy and the basest instincts,… a barbaric hatred for education, freedom, and humanism.”

Götz Aly (1947) German journalist, historian and social scientist

Source: Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (2011), p. 31

Education, Freedom, Affliction

“And surely, he that hath taken the true Altitude of Things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this Age, is not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less three or four hundred Years hence, when no Man can comfortably imagine what Face this World will carry.”

Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English polymath

Letter to a Friend (circa 1656)

Age, World, Imagination

“Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarely tell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking or "mathematics envy."”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

Truth, Mathematics, Thinking

“In all this world, I pray thee, who
Is virtuous, heroic, true?
Firm in his vows, of grateful mind,
To every creature good and kind?
Alone most fair to all men’s eyes?
Devoid of envy, firm, and sage,
Whose tranquil soul ne'er yields to rage?
Whom, when his warrior wrath is high,
Do Gods embattled fear and fly?
Whose noble might and gentle skill
The triple world can guard from ill? Who is the best of princes, he
Who loves his people’s good to see.”

Vālmīki Legendary Indian poet, author of the Ramayana

Source: King of Siam Rama I The-Ramayana https://books.google.co.in/books?id=OvqbCHa3zWkC&pg=PA19, Islamic Books, 1967, p. 19.

Love, Men, God, People

“Envy the kangaroo. That pouch setup is extraordinary; the baby crawls out of the womb when it is about two inches long, gets into the pouch, and proceeds to mature. I'd have a baby if it would develop in my handbag.”

Rita Rudner (1953) American comedian

On pregnancy and childbirth
Essay 2, p. 7-8
Naked Beneath My Clothes (1992)

Baby

“But, oh! what mighty magician can assuage
A woman's envy?”

George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne (1666–1735) 1st Baron Lansdowne

Progress of Beauty; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), "Envy", p. 226-27.

“Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 249

Communication, Evil

“Our forefathers and ancestors of all times have been of this nature and disposition, that, upon the winning of a battle, they have chosen rather, for a sign and memorial of their triumphs and victories, to erect trophies and monuments in the hearts of the vanquished by clemency than by architecture in the lands which they had conquered. For they did hold in greater estimation the lively remembrance of men purchased by liberality than the dumb inscription of arches, pillars, and pyramids, subject to the injury of storms and tempests, and to the envy of everyone.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Gargantua (1534), Chapter 50 : Gargantua's speech to the vanquished.

Men, Nature, Memory, Time

“It is doubly chimerical to build peace on economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict.”

E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) British economist

Source: Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), p. 36.

Men, Peace

“The order was made and sent out, without any reflection, and without thinking of the Jews as a sect or race to themselves, but simply as persons who had successfully, I say successfully instead of persistently because I know there were a plenty within my lines who envied them their success, violated an order, which violation innured greatly to help the rebels.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1860s, Letter to Isaac N. Morris (1868)

Thinking, Success, Help, Personality

“Wont you draw back the curtain within me,
O Lord Venkataramana of Tirupati, Open up this screen of envy.”

Tyagaraja (1767–1847) Carnatic musician and composer

[Jackson, William Joseph, Tyāgarāja and the Renewal of Tradition: Translations and Reflections, http://books.google.com/books?id=CZBnppBQgOsC&pg=PA69, 1 January 1994, Motilal Banarsidass Publ., 978-81-208-1146-1, 169–]

Drawing

“How noble and ennobling!—but within
How mean, how poor, how pitiful, how mix'd
With base alloy; how Disappointment tracks
The steps of Hope; how Envy dogs success;
How every victor's crown is lined with thorns,
And worn mid scoffs!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

A History of the Lyre
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Dogs, Hope, Disappointment, Success

“"The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he…" [Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, Putney Debates 1647] This is one Liberal Text. And it is more distinctive than may at first appear. It asserts the individual and the value of any individual - even the poorest He. But it asserts it without envy. It does not demand that the rich be made poor - nor even claim that the poor are more deserving than the rich. It demands equality in one thing only, the right to live one's own life.”

Jo Grimond (1913–1993) British soldier, politician and academic

The Liberal Future (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 12.

Life, Appearance

“To confess to freedom, the highest habit;
while so many are courting the powerful and look from below
to the tyrants slowly crossing through the town,
longing in envy to be seen in the crowd
and to narrate their parenthood.
Better to look on in serenity:
the noise of triumph is like a polluted river.
Better to decide and to act, at the service of the ready heart
and oppose the anonymous world,
uniting the individuals ever more in the * “thou.””

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

World, Freedom, Heart

“An artist who sees that the imitation of natural appearances, however artistic, is not for him – the kind of creative artist who wants to, and has to express his own inner world – sees with envy how naturally and easily such goals can be attained in music, the least material of the arts today. Understandably, he may turn toward it and try to find the same means in his own art. Hence the current search for rhythm in painting, for mathematical abstract construction.... the way colors are set in motion, etc.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

1910 - 1915
Source: On the Spiritual in Art, 1911; as quoted in Schönberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter, by Klaus Kropfinger; edited by Konrad Boehmer; published by Routledge (imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informal company), 2003, p. 15

World, Art, Music, Color

“He raped 10 women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

On Moshe Katsav NewsRu http://www.newsru.com/russia/19oct2006/olmert.html.

Women

“Slave food, even if monotonous, was plentiful. Corn bread and bacon were the mainstays, with plenty of fruit and vegetables in season. In hog-killing time, countenances were unusually greasy. Clothing also was on the par with that of the poorer white people and no less adequate in proportion to the climate than that of Northern laborers. If [negro children] ran naked it was generally from choice, and when the white boys had to put on shoes and go away to school they were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates. The color line began to appear at about that time.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The Making of America (1986)

Children, People, School, Food

“She envied Camille. Camille was a tramp, Mildred thought. And things were so much easier for a tramp. There was no conscience, no sense of loss, nothing but a wonderful, relaxed, stretching-cat selfishness. She could go to bed with anyone she wanted to and never see him again and have no feeling of loss or insecurity about it. That was the way Mildred thought it was with Camille. She wished she could be that way, and she knew she couldn't. Couldn't because of her mother. And the unbidden thought entered her mind—if her mother were only dead Mildred's life would be so much simpler. She could have a secret little place to live somewhere. Almost fiercely, she brushed the thought away. "What a foul thing to think," she said to herself ceremoniously. But it was a dream she often had.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 13. Mildred is the daughter of Elliot and Bernice Pritchard.

Life, Secret, Dreams, Way

“I've been hearing that from envious people since I was in standard 1. Between 1971 when I started Primary School to when I completed by Bar Exams, I became number 1 numerous times and whenever that happened, those who had performed dismally would shout "Pride Comes Before A Fall!" Mediocre performers have continued to shout the same thing at me ever since. The good news is that green envy has never sabotaged the progress of any determined organic intellectual and visionary leader. So, yours are like the croaks of toads in a pond. They will never deter the Lion from drinking water.”

Miguna Miguna (1962) lawyer, author and columnist

Reply to a Facebook detractor who said "pride goes before a fall", 2016
2016

People, School, Drink, Water

“Our political capacity for avoiding upheavals, our gift for "animated moderation" (in Bagehot's phrase), has long been envied by our continental neighbours. They will find once again, I venture to prophesy, that we shall get together and modify presently our institutions to suit the new conditions. We are not good at planning ahead, but we have a gift for improvising and compromising.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 42.
1930

Animals

“No wearisome days, no sorrowful nights; no hunger or thirst; no anxiety or fears; no envies, no jealousies, no breaches of friendship, no sad separations, no distrusts or forebodings, no self-reproaches, no enmities, no bitter regrets, no tears, no heartaches; "And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away."”

Randolph Sinks Foster (1820–1903) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 300.

Death, Hunger, Pain, Friendship

“It often happens that we are most touched by what we are least capable of. Evanescent delicacy is not the quality in the arts that I admire most, but it is often the characteristic by which I am most reduced to envy.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 64

Art

“Do not endeavour to shine in all companies. Leave room for your hearers to imagine something within you beyond all you have said. And remember, the more you are praised, the more you will be envied.”

James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician

The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)

Imagination

“Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause a while from learning to be wise.
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail —
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Line 157

Life, World, Learning

“Now reigneth pride in prize
and covetousness is held wise,
and lechery without shame
and gluttony without blame.
Envy reigneth with treason
and sloth is taken in great season.
God do boot, for now is time. Amen.”

John Ball (priest) (1338–1381) English rebel and priest

Letter to the people, quoted in Annals, or a General Chronicle of England by John Stow. "Boot" here means "amends," as in the ancient Anglo-Saxon laws

God, Time, Season

“Although our "gentle air" cannot improve the way hate and envy look, it does seem not to encourage firmness and decision. All is compromise; caution and refinement are everywhere. Everything has to "make a good impression" — whether or not it is any good: the impression is the main thing.”

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) Austrian-American composer

"About Music Criticism" (1909), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 196
1900s

Hate, Way, Decision

“How wonderful it can be, and what nobility it proves in young men, when they pledge one another a friendship that can never be shadowed by selfishness, envy, or jealousy.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

little Steina
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

Men, Friendship, Jealousy, Selfishness

“Let us not envy a certain class of men for their enormous riches; they have paid such an equivalent for them that it would not suit us; they have given for them their peace of mind, their health, their honour, and their conscience; this is rather too dear, and there is nothing to be made out of such a bargain.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

N'envions point à une sorte de gens leurs grandes richesses; ils les ont à titre onéreux, et qui ne nous accommoderait point: ils ont mis leur repos, leur santé, leur honneur et leur conscience pour les avoir; cela est trop cher, et il n'y a rien à gagner à un tel marché.
Aphorism 13
Les Caractères (1688), Des biens de fortune

Men, Health, Peace

“These two characteristics make revenge the most suitable source for the formation of ressentiment. The nuances of language are precise. There is a progression of feeling which starts with revenge and runs via rancor, envy, and impulse to detract all the way to spite, coming close to ressentiment. Usually, revenge and envy still have specific objects. They do not arise without special reasons and are directed against definite objects, so that they do not outlast their motives. The desire for revenge disappears when vengeance has been taken, when the person against whom it was directed has been punished or has punished himself, or when one truly forgives him. In the same way, envy vanishes when the envied possession becomes ours. The impulse to detract, however, is not in the same sense tied to definite objects—it does not arise through specific causes with which it disappears. On the contrary, this affect seeks those objects, those aspects of men and things, from which it can draw gratification. It likes to disparage and to smash pedestals, to dwell on the negative aspects of excellent men and things, exulting in the fact that such faults are more perceptible through their contrast with the strongly positive qualities. Thus there is set a fixed pattern of experience which can accommodate the most diverse contents. This form or structure fashions each concrete experience of life and selects it from possible experiences. The impulse to detract, therefore, is no mere result of such an experience, and the experience will arise regardless of considerations whether its object could in any way, directly or indirectly, further or hamper the individual concerned. In “spite,” this impulse has become even more profound and deep-seated—it is, as it were, always ready to burst forth and to betray itself in an unbridled gesture, a way of smiling, etc. An analogous road leads from simple *Schadenfreude* to “malice.””

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

The latter, more detached than the former from definite objects, tries to bring about ever new opportunities for *Schadenfreude*.
Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life, Men, Smile, Way

“A bug! A bug! Isn’t it just so satisfying to discover bugs in other people’s programs? Especially people from Microsoft. I don’t know why, it’s probably some kind of Freudian code-envy thing.”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

1995/6
About Microsoft

People

“They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge … no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command … But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Profiles of the Future (1962)
1960s

God, Imagination, Knowledge, Universe

“He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing - viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as the standard of felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches. He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

Source: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 1, Start in Life.

Life, Happiness, People, Parting

“Ethiopia did not have the same problem [of corruption]. African leaders looked at us with envy.”

Mengistu Haile Mariam (1937) Former dictator of Ethiopia

As quoted in "Mengistu blames Meles for helping Eritrea at UN to split Ethiopia: Mengistu Haile-Mariam speaks", in Jimma Times (30 July 2010) http://www.jimmatimes.com/article/Latest_News/Latest_News/Mengistu_blames_Meles_for_helping_Eritrea_at_UN_to_split_Ethiopia/33629

Problem

“If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 89

Personality

“"This law of the release of tension through illusory valuation gains new significance, full of infinite consequences, for the ressentiment attitude. To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness. These affects have become fixed attitudes, detached from all determinate objects. Independently of his will, this man's attention will be instinctively drawn by all events which can set these affects in motion. The ressentiment attitude even plays a role in the formation of perceptions, expectations, and memories. It automatically selects those aspects of experience which can justify the factual application of this pattern of feeling. Therefore such phenomena as joy, splendor, power, happiness, fortune, and strength magically attract the man of ressentiment. He cannot pass by, he has to look at them, whether he “wants” to or not. But at the same time he wants to avert his eyes, for he is tormented by the craving to possess them and knows that his desire is vain. The first result of this inner process is a characteristic falsification of the world view. Regardless of what he observes, his world has a peculiar structure of emotional stress. The more the impulse to turn away from those positive values prevails, the more he turns without transition to their negative opposites, on which he concentrates increasingly. He has an urge to scold, to depreciate, to belittle whatever he can. Thus he involuntarily “slanders” life and the world in order to justify his inner pattern of value experience.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life, Happiness, Secret, World

“Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up,
The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,
Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms
Wart of the common-weal,
Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things
Darkness the defiler
Twin evil of envy,
Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things
Passing the doors of temples defiling the grove of Paphos,
neschek, the crawling evil,
slime, the corrupter of all things,
Poisoner of the fount,
of all fountains, neschek,
The serpent, evil against Nature's increase,
Against beauty”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Addendum for C
neschek is a transliteration of the Hebrew "נֶשֶׁך" meaning "usury"
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

Beauty, Hell, Nature, Evil

“Such a businessman has never become rich whose mouth was full of slander and his heart full of envy of success of the others, who could with great skill reveal the mistakes of his competitor. However that one has never been and will never be poor who serves his customers with words of cordial kindness and whose eyes can see rather the positive than the negative features of the competitor so that he could use them.”

Tomáš Baťa (1876–1932) Czech businessman

Tomas Bata (1928), translated and cited in: Tribus, Myron. "Lessons from Tomas Bata for the Modern Day Manager." Tvůrčí odkaz Tomáše Bati a současné podnikatelské metody (2001).

Success, Heart

“Old and sick, more than one hundred years
Face haggard, hair white, I'm happy to still live in the mountains
A cloth covered phantom watching the years flow by
Why envy people with clever ways of living?”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Happiness, People, Way, Mountain

“The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other; for envy creates the beginning of strife.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Freeman (1948), p. 166
Variant: Envy is the cause of political division.

Law

“I will achieve it only [being an artist] by perseverance, and by openly asserting my determination to emancipate myself, [but].... I both lament and envy your [Edma's] fate. Bichette [her niece] helps me to understand maternal love; she comes onto my bed every morning and plays so sweetly.... life gets more complicated by the day here now I am gripped by the desire to have children, that' all I need.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

in an unpublished extract from a letter of Berthe to Edma, written in 1869; as cited in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, ed. Denis Rouart; Camden, London 1986 / Kinston, R. I. Moyer Bell, 1989, p. 31 (private collection)
1860 - 1870

Love, Life, Fate, Children

“Five enemies of peace inhabit with us — avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.”

Francesco Petrarca book De vita solitaria

De vita solitaria (1346) as quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing‎ (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 144

Peace, Anger

“I now began for the first time to envy those young cubs at the university who had fine scholars to tell them what was what; professors who had devoted their lives to mastering and focusing ideas in every branch of learning; who were eager to distribute the treasures they had gathered before they were overtaken by the night. But now I pity undergraduates, when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity. After all, a man’s Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 9 (Education At Bangalore).

Life, Idea, Learning, Universe

“Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you've got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you're right, there's an exemption for — I don't know — maybe a million dollars now, and it's scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.' And this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives, they may have other things to focus on, they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income once, the government should leave you alone. Shouldn't come back and try and tax you again.”

Grover Norquist (1956) Conservative Lobbyist

interview with NPR's Terry Gross on the program Fresh Air, October 2, 2003.
2003

Death, Money, Hate, People

“Well it’s quite obvious Cricket Australia don’t give a damn; the selectors don’t give a damn. The Australian cricket team has an X-factor that no other team in the world has. The others look at us with envy. It’s about the culture of the team and you can’t mess with that. The lack of empathy that has been shown to Brad Haddin after the trauma he has gone through over the past two weeks has messed with the team culture; I have no doubt about it”

Matthew Hayden (1971) Australian cricketer

Quoted on The Daily Telegraph (July 30, 2015), "Matthew Hayden fears Australian team culture could be affected by dropping of Brad Haddin" http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/cricket/matthew-hayden-fears-australian-team-culture-could-be-affected-by-dropping-of-brad-haddin/news-story/08a3e9ac471abf5418d8dd3a34deff82

World, Past

“Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy!
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age!
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry:
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

XLV, On My First Son, lines 1-12
The Works of Ben Jonson, First Folio (1616), Epigrams

Love, Fate, Lie, Age

“[ William Tyndale is a man] replete with venomous envy, rancour and malice.”

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (1485–1540) English statesman and chief minister to King Henry VIII of England

Letter to Stephen Vaughan after May 1531. (Merriman, i. p. 335.)

“I envied him these passions. If you had passions, you were living. Without them, you were watching––the way I was watching desert sand and half-dead creosote go by and wishing I’d stop craving attention from Charles.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

"Tierra Blanca" Bryant Literary Review, Vol. 11 http://bryantliteraryreview.org/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=2&cntnt01returnid=56 (2010) <br class="br">2010-

Way, Passion, Dead

“To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness. These affects have become fixed attitudes, detached from all determinate objects. Independently of his will, this man’s attention will be instinctively drawn by all events which can set these affects in motion. The ressentiment attitude even plays a role in the formation of perceptions, expectations, and memories. It automatically selects those aspects of experience which can justify the factual application of this pattern of feeling.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 74

Secret, Feeling, Memory

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

Fate, People, Pleasure, Youth

“He who feels that in his inmost being he cannot be compared with others, will be his own lawgiver. For one thing is needful: to give style to one’s character. This art is practised by him who, with an eye for the strong and weak sides of his nature, removes from it one quality and another, and then by daily practice and acquired habit replaces them by others which become second nature to him; in other words, he puts himself under restraint in order by degrees to bend his nature entirely to his own law. Only thus does a man arrive at satisfaction with himself, and only thus does he become endurable to others. For the dissatisfied and the unsuccessful as a rule avenge themselves on others. They absorb poison from everything, from their own incompetence as well as from their poor circumstances, and they live in a constant craving for revenge on those in whose nature they suspect harmony. Such people ever have virtuous precepts on their lips; the whole jingle of morality, seriousness, chastity, the claims of life; and their hearts ever burn with envy of those who have become well [harmonious] and can therefore enjoy life.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 26

Life, People, Law, Art

“The disconcerting fact may first be pointed out that if you write badly about good writing, however profound may be your convictions or emphatic your expression of them, your style has a tiresome trick (as a wit once pointed out) of whispering: ‘Don’t listen!’ in your readers’ ears. And it is possible also to suggest that the promulgation of new-fangled aesthetic dogmas in unwieldy sentences may be accounted for—not perhaps unspitefully—by a certain deficiency in aesthetic sensibility; as being due to a lack of that delicate, unreasoned, prompt delight in all the varied and subtle manifestations in which beauty may enchant us.
Or, if the controversy is to be carried further; and if, to place it on a more modern basis, we adopt the materialistic method of interpreting aesthetic phenomena now in fashion, may we not find reason to believe that the antagonism between journalist critics and the fine writers they disapprove of is due in its ultimate analysis to what we may designate as economic causes? Are not the authors who earn their livings by their pens, and those who, by what some regard as a social injustice, have been more or less freed from this necessity—are not these two classes of authors in a sort of natural opposition to each other? He who writes at his leisure, with the desire to master his difficult art, can hardly help envying the profits of money-making authors.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

criticizing the Cambridge School of criticism, e.g. John Middleton Murry and Herbert Read, “Fine Writing,” pp. 306-307
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Money, Beauty, Art, Fashion

“I knew that what I had felt was envy or regret, not for something lost but for something never achieved.”

P. D. James book The Children of Men

The Children of Men (1992)

“Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy.”

Giannina Braschi book United States of Banana

United States of Banana (2011)

“My heart is with thee, Iove! though now
Thou'rt far away from me :
I envy even my own thoughts,
For they may fly to thee.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(19th October 1822) Songs of Absence
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Heart, Flying

“I for my part still conceive it to be the paramount duty of a British member of parliament to consider what is good for Great Britain…I do not envy that man's feelings, who can behold the sufferings of Switzerland, and who derives from that sight no idea of what is meant by the deliverance of Europe. I do not envy the feelings of that man, who can look without emotion at Italy – plundered, insulted, trampled upon, exhausted, covered with ridicule, and horror, and devastation – who can look at all this, and be at a loss to guess what is meant by the deliverance of Europe? As little do I envy the feelings of that man, who can view the peoples of the Netherlands driven into insurrection, and struggling for their freedom against the heavy hand of a merciless tyranny, without entertaining any suspicion of what may be the sense of the word deliverance. Does such a man contemplate Holland groaning under arbitrary oppressions and exactions? Does he turn his eyes to Spain trembling at the nod of a foreign master? And does the word deliverance still sound unintelligibly in his ear? Has he heard of the rescue and salvation of Naples, by the appearance and the triumphs of the British fleet? Does he know that the monarchy of Naples maintains its existence at the sword's point? And is his understanding, and his heart, still impenetrable to the sense and meaning of the deliverance of Europe?”

George Canning (1770–1827) British statesman and politician

Speech in 1798, quoted in Wendy Hinde, George Canning (London: Purnell Books Services, 1973), p. 66.

People, Feeling, Idea, Understanding

“If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration, which the ancient Greeks themselves might have envied. It may be admitted, without any disparagement to the eminence of such great mathematicians as Euler and Cauchy that they were so overwhelmed with the exuberant wealth of their own creations, and so fascinated by the interest attaching to the results at which they arrived, that they did not greatly care to expend their time in arranging their ideas in a strictly logical order, or even in establishing by irrefragable proof propositions which they instinctively felt, and could almost see to be true. With Gauss the case was otherwise. It may seem paradoxical, but it is probably nevertheless true that it is precisely the effort after a logical perfection of form which has rendered the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and unnecessary difficulty. The fact is that there is neither obscurity nor difficulty in his writings, as long as we read them in the submissive spirit in which an intelligent schoolboy is made to read his Euclid. Every assertion that is made is fully proved, and the assertions succeed one another in a perfectly just analogical order… But when we have finished the perusal, we soon begin to feel that our work is but begun, that we are still standing on the threshold of the temple, and that there is a secret which lies behind the veil and is as yet concealed from us. No vestige appears of the process by which the result itself was obtained, perhaps not even a trace of the considerations which suggested the successive steps of the demonstration. Gauss says more than once that for brevity, he gives only the synthesis, and suppresses the analysis of his propositions. Pauca sed matura—few but well matured… If, on the other hand, we turn to a memoir of Euler's, there is a sort of free and luxuriant gracefulness about the whole performance, which tells of the quiet pleasure which Euler must have taken in each step of his work; but we are conscious nevertheless that we are at an immense distance from the severe grandeur of design which is characteristic of all Gauss's greater efforts.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted by Alexander Macfarlane, Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century (1916) p. 95, https://books.google.com/books?id=43SBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA95 "Henry John Stephen Smith (1826-1883) A Lecture delivered March 15, 1902"

Pleasure, Secret, Age, Feeling

“Ask the faithful youth
Why the cold urn of her whom long he loved
So often fills his arms; so often draws
His lonely footsteps at the silent hour
To pay the mournful tribute of his tears?
Oh! he will tell thee that the wealth of worlds
Should ne'er seduce his bosom to forego
That sacred hour, when, stealing from the noise
Of care and envy, sweet remembrance soothes
With virtue's kindest looks his aching breast,
And turns his tears to rapture.”

Mark Akenside book The Pleasures of the Imagination

Book II, lines 683–693
The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744)

Love, Youth, World, Faith

“All civilizations go though similar processes of emergence, rise, and decline. The West differs from other civilizations not in the way it has developed but in the distinctive character of its values and institutions. These include most notably its Christianity, pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, which made it possible for the West to invent modernity, expand throughout the world, and become the envy of other societies. In their ensemble these characteristics are peculiar to the West. Europe, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has said, is “the source — the unique source” of the “ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom. . . . These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.” They make Western civilization unique, and Western civilization is valuable not because it is universal but because it is unique. The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power, but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization. Because it is the most powerful Western country, that responsibility falls overwhelmingly on the United States of America.
To preserve Western civilization in the face of declining Western power, it is in the interest of the United States and European countries … to recognize that Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 12 : The West, Civilizations, and Civilization, § 2 : The West In The World, p. 311

World, Law, Way, Democracy