According to a study conducted by researchers from Universidad de Zaragoza in Spain, envy is the most prevalent basic personality trait shaping human behavior that is present in almost one-third of the population. In the same study, researchers found that 90% of the population can be divided into four main personality traits: optimistic, pessimistic, trusting, and envious. And guess what, the largest proportion (30%) turned out to be “envious.” Although more studies would be required to support these findings, the truth is obvious - everyone has felt envy or jealousy at some point in their lives. However, some cope with these toxic feelings better than others.
That may be envy over someone who gets to go on holiday twice per year, perhaps someone is jealous that one grew up with both parents, or jealous because someone got to eat three times today, not just once. And to be fair, all these reasons are valid. However, envy is not an emotion one should feed off of to gain motivation. It’s a negative emotion that only draws hatred. It doesn’t inspire nor motivate us to strive for any good.
If you are someone who is struggling to deal with negative emotions, quotes about jealousy and envy can lead you on the right path. Reading through some wise words and inspiring quotes really can make a difference. It’s all about how we react and perceive things. Someone having something better than you or living a presumably better life shouldn’t make you envy or even hate them.
Often, envy and jealousy are rooted in low self-confidence and unresolved past issues. The many envy quotes and quotes about jealousy condemn these emotions, with some even referring to them as “diseases.” Although entirely natural and often detected unintentionally, this germ that is jealousy and envy should be shooed away and not allowed to spread.
Below, we’ve gathered some inspiring words from many sage individuals, as well as quotes on jealousy and the essence of envy. Let us know if any of the quotes about envy reached the deepest chambers of your heart.
“Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” — Joseph Epstein
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“Envy blinds men and makes it impossible for them to think clearly.” — Malcolm X
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“A lot of people get so hung up on what they can’t have that they don’t think for a second about whether they really want it.” — Lionel Shriver
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“Never trust anyone who wants what you’ve got. Friend or no, envy is an overwhelming emotion.” — Eubie Blake
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“Oh God, don’t envy me, I have my own pains.” — Barbra Streisand
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“Envy is pain at the good fortune of others.” — Aristotle
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“Don’t be envious. Be inspired.” — Thibaut
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“Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind.” — Buddha
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“Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.” — Josh Billings
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“Envy and jealousy are incurable diseases.” — Robert Kraft
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“Only fools live in the past or carry envy to the present.” — Chi Chi Rodriguez
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“Envy is for people who don’t have the self-esteem to be jealous.” — Bauvard
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“You mostly envy those who have what you desire.” — Susan Cain
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“Envy aims very high.” — Ovid
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“Carrying envy makes life more difficult.” — Kym Whitley
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“If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, you can bet the water bill is higher.” — Debbie Macomber
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“Envy creates silent enemies.” — Robert Greene
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“Let others either envy or pity me; I care not, so long as I enjoy myself.” — Joseph Hall
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“It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more approachable.” — Robert Greene
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“It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.” — Buddha.
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“The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.” — Margaret Thatcher
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“Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they’re big, flashing signs that something needs to change.” — Gretchen Rubin
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“Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.” — Heraclitus
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“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.” — Petrarch
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“Envy comes from people’s ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.” — Jean Vanier
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“Jealousy is the fear or apprehension of superiority: envy our uneasiness under it.” — William Shenstone
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“People who make the choice to study, work hard or do whatever they endeavor is to give it the max on themselves to reach to the top level. And you have the people who get envy and jealousy, yet are not willing to put that work in, and they want to get the same praise.” — Evander Holyfield
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“Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy.” — Oliver Stone
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“Envy is more irreconcilable than hatred.” — Francois de la Rochefoucauld
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“The price of success is to bear the criticism of envy.” — Denis Waitley
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“It is better to be envied than pitied.” — Herodotus
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“Envy is a sign of insecurity, yes; but so is longing to be envied.” — Criss Jami
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“A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.” — Proverbs 14:30, NIV
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“Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbor to have them through envy.” — Aristotle
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“A sign of wealth: no envy, no fear.” — Greg Isenberg
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“We experience envy when the quality we feel inferior about threatens our self-concept.” — Shane Parrish
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“We are always trying to become something else. We are always trying to become noble, to become a hero, an example, an ideal; and if we really go behind this urge to become, we will find that there is envy and that behind that envy there is fear, the fear of what one is.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
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“Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both.” — Robert Burton
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“Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.” — Mark Twain
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“The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.” — William Hazlitt
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“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.” — Petrarch
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“Frontrunners always attract envy, and a desperate campaign to stop them in their tracks.” — Kwasi Kwarteng
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“Envy and greed starve on a steady diet of thanksgiving.” — Billy Graham
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“The truest mark of being born with great qualities is being born without envy.” — Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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“It is good to vary in order that you may frustrate the curious, especially those who envy you.” — Baltasar Gracian
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“The truth is that we should live with less envy and more cordiality and empathy.” — Leonardo Bonucci
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“Don’t envy the harvest of the rich. Envy their planting.” — Bo Sanchez
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“Maybe jealousy and envy would fade if we knew the full story behind success. Maybe we would be less likely to put people on a pedestal.” — James Clear
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“We love in others what we lack ourselves, and would be everything but what we are.” — Richard Henry Stoddard
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“Pride, envy, avarice - these are the sparks have set on fire the hearts of all men.” — Dante Alighieri
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“Success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn’t that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing envy in the eyes of those around you.” — Marilyn Monroe
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“Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.” — Harold Coffin
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“We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.” — Karl A. Menninger
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“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.” — Susan Sontag
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“With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures, and some books, I live without envy.” — Lope de Vega
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“When men are full of envy they disparage everything, whether it be good or bad.” — Tacitus
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“Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can’t hope to attain through hard work and emulation.” — Martha Nussbaum
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“Everybody knows someone like that: wonderful, attractive people full of passion and ideals. You envy them, but you know there’s a dark side, which is brutal and cruel and violent. That dark side informs what’s wonderful about them, and the passion and rage inform the darkness; they’re inseparable.” — David Thewlis
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“Why would you envy a man who doesn’t know the names of all the planets, is a ‘high functioning’ sociopath and has no friends? Because Sherlock Holmes thinks in all the ways we wish we could.” — Kyle Hill
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“It is not greed that drives the world, but envy.” — Warren Buffett
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“Envy is like a fly that passes all the body’s sounder parts, and dwells upon the sores.” — Arthur Chapman
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“Envy is ever joined with the comparing of a man’s self; and where there is no comparison, no envy.” — Francis Bacon
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“It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.” — Aeschylus
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“Envy is the central fact of American life.” — Gore Vidal
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“Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul. Perhaps the comparison can be extended.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space, feels itself excluded.” — William Hazlitt
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“The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.” — Socrates
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“There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.” — Agnes Repplier
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“Blessed is he who has learned to admire but not envy, to follow but not imitate, to praise but not flatter, and to lead but not manipulate.” — William Arthur Ward
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“The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.” — Alain de Botton
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“Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart like a viper in its hole.” — Honoré de Balzac
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“For most of us, envy is the basis of our actions; remove envy and we feel we are lost. All our effort is towards success, and in that there is envy; behind that envy there is fear.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
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“When you make your mark in the world, watch out for the envious with erasers.” — Evan Esar
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“As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.” — Antisthenes
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“Class envy is dangerous.” — Jack Abramoff
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“Envy has the ugliness of a trapped rat that has gnawed its own foot in its effort to escape.” — Angus Wilson
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“Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Envy is thin because it bites but never eats.” — Spanish Proverb
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“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy – I don’t disparage envy, but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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“The gifts given to us by God must not be relinquished to those who speak ill of them and who are moved by envy or ignorance.” — Filippo Brunelleschi
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“Envy, like the worm, never runs but to the fairest fruit; like a cunning bloodhound, it singles out the fattest deer in the flock.” — Francis Beaumont
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“Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.” — Jonathan Sacks
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“Loyalty will not permit envy, hate, and uncharitableness to creep into our public thinking.” — Bainbridge Colby
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“I do not envy any animal, though I envy many of their capacities.” — Louis MacNeice
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“This only grant me, that my means may lie, too low for envy, for contempt to high.” — Abraham Cowley
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“The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.” — Horace
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“A man shall never be enriched by envy.” — Thomas Draxe
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“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery” — Winston Churchill
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“Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.” — Oliver Stone
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“It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.” — Aeschylus
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“If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.” — Cesare Pavese
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“Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.” — Aristotle
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“The few who do are the envy of the many who only watch.” — Jim Rohn
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“The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous.” — Rabindranath Tagore
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“The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.” — Victor Hugo
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“Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.” — Charles Bukowski
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“I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy — I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection.” — Irvin D. Yalom
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“A person is born with feelings of envy and hate. If he gives way to them, they will lead him to violence and crime, and any sense of loyalty and good faith will be abandoned.” — Xun Kuang
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“There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.” — Richard Brinsley Sheridan
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“I envy the dead.” — William Mulholland
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“Communism possesses a language which every people can understand - its elements are hunger, envy, and death.” — Heinrich Heine
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“The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods.” — Elbert Hubbard
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“I envy people who drink — at least they know what to blame everything on.” — Oscar Levant
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“I don’t envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.” — Christopher Hitchens
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“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don’t disparage envy, but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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“Envy like fire always makes for the highest points.” — Livy
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“Above all, you must fight conceit, envy, and every kind of ill-feeling in your heart.” — Abraham Cahan
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“Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Envy’s a coal comes hissing hot from Hell.” — Philip James Bailey
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“I think Julian Casablancas and Amy Winehouse are two contemporaries I envy.” — Pete Doherty
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“When I went to Philadelphia I was 26 years old and really sitting on top of the world. Family life, a professional career, plenty of friends and associates, and a good reputation, a wish list that could be the envy of many.” — Julius Erving
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“Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.” — Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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“Whoever envies another confesses his superiority.” — Samuel Johnson
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“Nothing sharpens sight like envy.” — Thomas Fuller
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“Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune.” — William Hazlitt
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“Oh, what a bitter thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.” — William Shakespeare
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“Our culture is based on envy.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
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“Envy motivates a lot of people.” — Shia LaBeouf
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“Envy suggests inferiority.” — Wayne Gerard Trotman
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“Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.” — Mark Twain
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“Men, 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.” — Moderata Fonte
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“The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.” — Baltasar Gracian
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“When you criticize someone, see if you are doing it out of envy. Your criticism reveals more about yourself than you realize.” — Haemin Sunim
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“Pride, which inspires us with so much envy, is sometimes of use toward the moderating of it too.” — Francois de la Rochefoucauld
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“Worth begets in base minds, envy; in great souls, emulation.” — Henry Fielding
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“I cannot think of any character below the flatterer, except he who envies him.” — Richard Steele
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“Now think of the things which goad man into destroying man: they are hope, envy, hatred, fear, and contempt.” — Marcus Aurelius
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“The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.” — Publius Syrus
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“Envy is the coward side of Hate, and all her ways are bleak and desolate.” — Henry Abbey
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“Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.” — Thomas Browne
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“I never envy the guys who get attention for partying too much or behaving badly.” — Thomas Gibson
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“We are and always will be the party of prosperity, not envy.” — Andrew Scheer
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“Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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“When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity… you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others.” — Robert Greene
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“There is more self-love than love in jealousy.” — Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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“God’s truth judges created things out of love, and Satan’s truth judges them out of envy and hatred.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“Religion is meant to teach us true spiritual human character. It is meant for self-transformation. It is meant to transform anxiety into peace, arrogance into humility, envy into compassion, to awaken the pure soul in man and his love for the Source, which is God.” — Radhanath Swami
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“I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.” — Ben Hecht
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“If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.” — Charley Reese
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“There are people who have never been taught anything and know everything, have never been anywhere, and understand everything, have never given a moment’s thought to anything, and comprehend everything. ‘Blessed hands’ is the name bestowed on these fortunate beings. The world envies, honors and respects them.” — Sholom Aleichem
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“Whoever cultivates the golden mean avoids both the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.” — Horace
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“If I am a fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.” — Lord Byron
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“Take heed you harbor not that vice called Envy, lest another’s happiness be your torment, and God’s blessing become your curse.” — Wellins Calcott
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“Fools may our scorn, not envy, raise. For envy is a kind of praise.” — John Gay
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“Envy is never general, but always very particular – at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.” — Joseph Epstein
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“Mediocrity’ doesn’t mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.” — Ayn Rand
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“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.” — John Berger
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“Moral indignation in most cases is, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy.” — Vittorio De Sica
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“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
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“I envy my daughter’s childhood.” — Rene Russo
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“The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.” — Adam Smith
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“It is never wise to seek or wish for another’s misfortune. If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.” — Charley Reese
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“Envy assails the noblest: the winds howl around the highest peaks.” — Ovid
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“Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.” — Teddy Roosevelt
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“I avoid envy at all costs.” — Claudia Winkleman
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“A clever conjurer is welcome anywhere, and those of us whose powers of entertainment are limited to the setting of booby-traps or the arranging of apple-pie beds must view with envy the much greater tribute of laughter and applause which is the lot of the prestidigitator with some natural gift for legerdemain.” — A. A. Milne
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“The Bible and several other self-help or enlightenment books cite the Seven Deadly Sins. They are: pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth, and gluttony. That pretty much covers everything that we do, that is sinful… or fun for that matter.” — Dave Mustaine
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“Family is so central to Afghan life that all Afghan stories are family stories. Family is something I simply can’t resist because all the great themes of human life - duty, grief, sacrifice, love, envy - you find all those things within families.” — Khaled Hosseini
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