Jealousy Quotes
Shakespeare leads by a long way, followed by Giannina Braschi, Horace, Seneca and La Rochefoucauld. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) is the best-sourced writer here, with two lines: anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love, and jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart. Leonardo’s notebooks say envy wounds with false accusations.
Two entries are flagged misattributed. “The living will envy the dead” is credited to Nikita Khrushchev, and a remark that we are all clever enough at envying a famous man while he is alive and praising him when he is dead is credited to Mimnermus.
A worthy man is bound to suffer malice and envy: a man grows in worth so long as he is envied.
Envy, my son, wears herself away, and droops like a lamb under the influence of the evil eye.
Envy assails the noblest: the winds howl around the highest peaks.
This only grant me, that my means may lie
Too low for envy, for contempt too high.
Metaphors and similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy.
Intuition is the positive energy that envy kills when it refuses to see the rainbow in the sky.
No true love there can be without
Its dread penalty—jealousy.
Envy wounds with false accusations, that is with detraction, a thing which scares virtue.
With that malignant envy which turns pale,
And sickens, even if a friend prevail.
Envy not greatness: for thou mak'st thereby
Thyself the worse, and so the distance greater.
The artist envies what the artist gains,
The bard the rival bard's successful strains.