41 Envy Quotes

In the landscape of human emotions, envy stands out as a complex and often misunderstood sentiment. It’s a feeling that can range from slight discomfort to something more intense and pervasive, impacting our interactions and perceptions of the world around us. From ancient philosophers to modern thinkers, many have delved into the nature of envy, offering insights that are both thought-provoking and enlightening. In this post, we've curated a collection of the top 41 quotes about envy, each offering a unique perspective on this intricate emotion. Whether you're seeking to understand your feelings or looking for wisdom on handling envy in others, these quotes provide a valuable lens through which to explore this powerful human experience.

1. “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. ” - Carrie Fisher

2. “Years from now, when I'm successful and happy, ...and he's in prison... I hope I'm not too mature to gloat.” - Bill Watterson

3. “There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale.” - Anna Godbersen

4. “It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.” - Aeschylus

5. “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.” - Erich Fromm

6. “One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies. “They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.” - Jess C. Scott

7. “I wanted what women always want: permission. But he'd had that before this book was even written; it was, after all, the first thing I'd envied about him. It was arguably what enabled him to write the book in the first place. ("Envy")” - Kathryn Chetkovich

8. “Inventory:"Four be the things I am wiser to know:Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.Four be the things I'd been better without:Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.Three be the things I shall never attain:Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.Three be the things I shall have till I die:Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.” - Dorothy Parker

9. “I had forgotten. Disgust shadows desire.Another life is never safely envied.” - Robert Wells

10. “There they were, the movers and shakers of Benjamin Franklin Hight - the sports stars, the cheerleaders, the good, the great, the gorgeous - bent over their pizzas.Trish sensed my angst and said, "My mother says girls like Lisa Shooty get the ultimate curse known to man.""What's that?""Too much too soon."I looked at poor, cursed Lisa who had been sprayed with sex appeal at birth. She had gleaming teeth and long, raven-black curls. She threw back her head and laughed with diamond-studded joy."When do you think the curse takes effect?" I asked."Not in our lifetime," Trish answered.” - Joan Bauer

11. “I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

12. “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

13. “Don't envy those who seems having everything, they don't really have everything. They have what they want and live the life they want but they don't have what they really need.” - Ann Marie Aguilar

14. “Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn't change the heart of others-- it only changes yours.” - Shannon Alder

15. “Envy is for people who don’t have the self-esteem to be jealous.” - Bauvard

16. “What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.” - Criss Jami

17. “There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.” - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

18. “Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.” - Umberto Eco

19. “You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but your didn't. As long as your heart kept pumping an your blood kept blowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn't. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn't stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.” - Ann Brashares

20. “[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique.” - Moderata Fonte

21. “When you're and only child in a family with an only parent, you look at other, bigger families with envy. Mary Alice had a family with a station wagon, a split-level house, and a pool. But then I looked up and saw Mary Alice's toes, as she stood at the edged of the diving board. Her second toe lay on top of her big toe on each foot. I had never seen such a thing. I wondered if Mary Alice's toes would ever prevent her from doing the things she wanted to do in life. "Look, y'all!" she said, forming her perfect body into a perfect swan's dive. I decided then that any time I got frustrated with my overall situation in life, mad or jealous of knee socks or a pink canopy bed in a pink room, I'd take a deep breath and think about Mary Alice's toes. At least I didn't have Mary Alice's toes.” - Margaret McMullan

22. “She left me, offended at my want of sympathy, and thinking, no doubt, that I envied her. I did not - at least, I firmly believed I did not.” - Anne Brontë

23. “The bittersweet about truth is that nothing could be more hurtful, yet nothing could be more helpful.” - Mike Norton

24. “When I envied a man's spurs then they were indeed worth coveting.” - Zane Grey

25. “When I realize that God makes his gifts fit each person, there's no way I can covet what you got because it just wouldn't fit me.” - William P. Smith

26. “You can feel anything. All is free for you to feel. But I guarantee you that if you allow yourself to feel envy and then to swim in it, that envy will destroy you and the people around you. Envy is unlike anger. Envy is not a right wing nor a left wing, it is not on either end of the balancing beam. Nobody needs it and I can assure you that once you give yourself to it, you will be eaten up. Envy can even eat up nations, casting them up against each other and pull a whole nation down into an internal collapse.” - C. JoyBell C.

27. “If you swim effortlessly in the deep oceans, ride the waves to and from the shore, if you can breathe under water and dine on the deep treasures of the seas; mark my words, those who dwell on the rocks carrying nets will try to reel you into their catch. The last thing they want is for you to thrive in your habitat because they stand in their atmosphere where they beg and gasp for some air.” - C. JoyBell C.

28. “If you are stealing people's thunder just by being around and standing there; you really can't expect people to like you. People want their own thunder to be heard loud and wide, not yours! Swans should never despair over ducks not liking them.” - C. JoyBell C.

29. “Whatever worldly thing we may covet - zealously striving to obtain and then retain - never seems to bring an end to our desires. Covetousness, envy, jealousy, and greed always escalate into a vicious spiral, as we seek greater and greater gratification but find less and less contentment. . . . Striving to acquire the things of the world not only does not bring lasting happiness and peace, but it drives us to seek more. When "all we've ever wanted" is grounded in the temporal trappings of this world, it is never enough!” - Brent Top

30. “I'm not equipped to handle what she has, both good and bad and what she has is always a package deal of both. In other words, I've been assigned a load I can handle.” - Lysa Terheurst

31. “No bird in a cage has ever come to know what the mountain winds feel like, by staring at the free flying birds, wishing that they would fall from the sky!” - C. JoyBell C.

32. “We ruined each other by being together. We destroyed each other’s dreams.” - Kate Chisman

33. “The way you think about yourself determines your reality. You are not being hurt by the way people think about you. Many of those people are a reflection of how you think about yourself.” - Shannon L. Alder

34. “Envy won't make you a better poet.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer

35. “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

36. “I was just thinking... how it is not and it will never be okay to cause pain in someone's life just because of the fact that you are envious of them! Is someone taller than you? Richer than you? More beautiful? That doesn't make it okay to hurt those people, for all you know, they bear deep wounds and carry heavy burdens and their heartache is far greater than anything you could ever bear! People try to hurt people that they're envious of, without knowing that they are adding to what is already painful. And because someone has more than you or has what it is that you want, doesn't mean that they owe you anything! It's not their fault! Be careful, you may just be wounding an angel soul, and a wound inflicted upon an angel soul, will always, always come back to haunt- YOU.” - C. JoyBell C.

37. “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

38. “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

39. “When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

40. “The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation.” - Criss Jami

41. “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