“The postman on his bicycle, she envied him, envied his wheels kissing the cobbles, that he knew one language only, one country only, envied his undivided past, undivided from his future.”

“In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.”

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

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

“The utopian desire for an egalitarian society cannot, however, have sprung from any other motive than that of an inability to come to terms with one’s own envy, and/or with the supposed envy of one’s less well-off fellow men. It must be obvious how such a man, even if only prompted by his unconscious, would carefully evade the phenomenon of envy or try to belittle it!”

“A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.”