Last Updated: November 5, 2022 by Quote.cc Team
Jealousy and envy are often considered some of the more destructive human feelings.
Jealousy often makes us do incredibly harmful things to ourselves and the people around us. When you are jealous of someone, you experience a plethora of negative emotions, bringing out the worst aspects of us. It is unhealthy, prevents us from moving forward, and fixates on what others have instead of what we want to work on.
It is a gift to let envy go, and it is life-changing to turn the emotion into a positive one that motivates and inspires us. Why will reading jealousy quotes help you overcome this feeling? How can it help with envy? Many great thinkers and wise individuals from across history have delved deeply into this emotion, and they’ve endowed us with some genuinely priceless advice if we open our ears and hearts to some of their words.
We’ve compiled a list of 200 jealousy quotes to help you understand all of its many masks. Humankind has dealt with jealousy and envy since time immemorial, and they feature heavily as big no-no’s in every religion, whether Christianity or Buddhism.
200 Jealousy And Envy Quotes
Top 10 Jealousy Quotes
“Don’t be envious. Be inspired.” – Thibaut
“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.” – Fulton J. Sheen
“Facebook just sounds like a drag, in my day seeing pictures of peoples vacations was considered a punishment.” – Betty White
“It’s a completely useless emotion – jealousy. I don’t go there.” – Joy Behar
“Anger, hatred and jealousy never solve problems, only affection, concern and respect can do that.” – Dalai Lama
“Afflictive emotions – our jealousy, anger, hatred, fear – can be put to an end. When you realize that these emotions are only temporary, that they always pass on like clouds in the sky, you also realize they can ultimately be abandoned.” – Dalai Lama
“Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Everybody pities the weak; jealousy you have to earn.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Jealousy in romance is like salt in food. A little can enhance the savor, but too much can spoil the pleasure and, under certain circumstances, can be life-threatening.” – Maya Angelou
“Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.” – George Eliot
Cute Jealousy Quotes
“If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.” – Mother Teresa
“Insecure people only eclipse your sun because they’re jealous of your daylight and tired of their dark, starless nights.” – Shannon L. Alder
“The people who know the least about you, always have the most to say.”
“Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.” – Iris Murdoch
“A flower never thinks of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.”
“Jealousy is the great exaggerator.” – Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
“The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.” – Baltasar Gracián
“Jealousy only eats up your beauty. Have faith in yourself. You have something that other’s don’t”
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt
“Jealousy – that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.” – Emile M. Cioran
“Surrounded by the flames of jealousy, the jealous one winds up, like the scorpion, turning the poisoned sting against himself.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“It is better to be envied than pitied.” – Herodotus
“Jealousy is natural but it isn’t necessary”
“Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.” – Elizabeth Bowen
“Jealousy or a zero-sum view of success, someone else getting all the attention.” – Jerry Neumann
“Jealousy is a disease. Get well soon.”
“Jealousy can open the blood, it can make black roses.” – Sylvia Plath
“Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.” – Francois de la Rochefoucauld
“I don’t ever remember being particularly jealous of anybody, because I figured if I can’t do it myself, I don’t deserve to get it.” – Clyde Tombaugh
“A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.” – Robert A. Heinlein
“Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.” – Erica Jong
“If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, you can bet the water bill is higher.” – Debbie Macomber
“Whoever envies another confesses his superiority.” – Samuel Johnson
“Never outshine the master.” – Robert Greene
“The ear of jealousy heareth all things.” – The Bible
“She let the jealousy slip out of her fingertips.” – Jodi Lynn Anderson
Envy And Jealousy Quotes
“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
“Our envy of others devours us most of all.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“Rust consumes iron and envy consumes itself.” – Danish Proverb
“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
“Fools may our scorn, not envy, raise. For envy is a kind of praise.” – John Gay
“A show of envy is an insult to oneself.” – Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko
“Envy is a declaration of inferiority.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
“Envy is the coward side of Hate, and all her ways are bleak and desolate.” – Henry Abbey
“Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another’s prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.” – Charles Caleb Colton
“Take heed you harbor not that vice call’d Envy, lest another’s happiness be your torment, and God’s blessing become your curse.” – Wellins Calcott
“Envy is a symptom of lack of appreciation of our own uniqueness and self worth. Each of us has something to give that no one else has.” – Elizabeth O’Connor
“A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness of the bones.” – Proverbs 14:30
“As iron is eaten by rust, so are the envious consumed by envy.” – Antisthenes
“Our culture is based on envy.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
“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
“The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.” – Socrates
“Envy of others is always a reflection of something we feel about ourselves.” – Shane Parrish
“Envy is ever joined with the comparing of a man’s self; and where there is no comparison, no envy.” – Francis Bacon
“We experience envy when the quality we feel inferior about threatens our self-concept.” – Shane Parrish
“Envy blinds men and makes it impossible for them to think clearly.” – Malcolm X
“Envy suggests inferiority.” – Wayne Gerard Trotman
“Envy is ignorance.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart like a viper in its hole.” – Honoré de Balzac
“When you criticize someone, see if you are doing it out of envy. Your criticism reveals more about yourself than you realize.” – Haemin Sunim
“He who is jealous, is never jealous of what you see, with what is imagined is enough.” – Jacinto Benavente
“Envy is a waste of time.”
“Envy slays itself by its own arrows.”
“Envy is thin because it bites but never eats.” – Spanish Proverb
“The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.” – Victor Hugo
“Envy comes from people’s ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.” – Jean Vanier
“Nothing sharpens sight like envy.” – Thomas Fuller
“Now think of the things which goad man into destroying man: they are hope, envy, hatred, fear and contempt.” – Marcus Aurelius
“Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul. Perhaps the comparison can be extended.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“My wife’s jealousy is getting ridiculous. The other day she looked at my calendar and wanted to know who May was.” – Rodney Dangerfield
“Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind.” – Buddha
“The truest mark of being born with great qualities is being born without envy.” – François de la Rochefoucauld
“The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.” – Margaret Thatcher
“Envy is pain at the good fortune of others.” – Aristotle
“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
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.” – Ann Brashares
“Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, ‘social justice.’” – Thomas Sowell
“Envy is more irreconcilable than hatred.” – François de la Rochefoucauld
“Jealousy is the fear or apprehension of superiority: envy our uneasiness under it.” – William Shenstone
“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
“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
“Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.” – Harold Coffin
“Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.” – François de la Rochefoucauld
“Envy aims very high.” – Ovid
“O! Beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” – William Shakespeare
“Pride, envy, avarice – these are the sparks have set on fire the hearts of all men.” – Dante Alighieri
“The few who do are the envy of the many who only watch.” – Jim Rohn
“Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more approachable.” – Robert Greene
“A sign of wealth: no envy, no fear.” – Greg Isenberg
“Jealousy is a keen observer, but looks for all the wrong signs.” – H. L. Mencken
“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
“I envy people who drink – at least they know what to blame everything on.” – Oscar Levant
“Envy is like a fly that passes all the body’s sounder parts, and dwells upon the sores.” – Arthur Chapman
“Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both.” – Robert Burton
“Jealousy is an ugly emotion that makes people do some seriously whacked shit and when a woman is experiencing it, it’s worse.” – Kristen Ashley
“Envy motivates a lot of people.” – Shia LaBeouf
“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
“Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” – Joseph Epstein
“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
“Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire.” – Susan Cain
“Envy is an insult to oneself.” – Yevgeny Yevtushenko
“Jealousy… is a mental cancer.” – C. Forbes
“The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.” – Publius Syrus
“Envy shoots at others and wounds itself.” – English Proverb
“Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.” – Mark Twain
“Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Keep yourselves far from envy; it eateth up and taketh away good actions, like as fire eateth up and burneth wood.” – Muhammad
“People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority.” – Lord Chesterfield
“Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.” – Honore de Balzac
“Envy creates silent enemies.” – Robert Greene
“Envy is the central fact of American life.” – Gore Vidal
“The best way to avoid envy is to deserve the success you get.” – Aristotle
“It is not greed that drives the world, but envy.” – Warren Buffett
“Envy assails the noblest: the winds howl around the highest peaks.” – Ovid
“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
“Jealousy is information. It tells you what you desire, what you admire, what you despise in yourself. You could learn from the person you envy if you weren’t blinded by resentment. Learning feels better than loathing.” – Marcus Aurelius
Family Jealousy Quotes
“Do you want to be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, and their self image? If you’re not willing to do a whole sale, 24/7, 100% swap with who that person is, then there’s no point in being jealous.” – Naval Ravikant
“Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Jealous people want to see you do good, but never better than them.”
“Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.” – Françoise Sagan
“A jealous woman does better research than FBI.”
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surely… None of them can hurt me. Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people… It will keep you from doing anything useful. Why do you not rather act than complain?” – Marcus Aurelius
“Growth will convert your doubters better than verbal defensiveness. Outgrow your critics in every sense.”
“Jealousy implies dissatisfaction with what you are.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Jealousy is a miserable feeling. It means you aspire to something that you cannot have.” – Sophia Loren
“Don’t waste time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind.” – Mary Schmich
“Jealousy is the very reverse of understanding, of sympathy, and of generous feeling. Never has jealousy added to character, never does it make the individual big and fine.” – Emma Goldman
“Winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners”
“One of the most powerful lessons in life is to recognize that no one can give you power, and many people don’t want you to have it. You have to find the courage to seize it, own it and hold on!” – Shannon L. Alder
“To live without comparison is to remove a tremendous burden.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
“I thought that jealousy was an idea. It isn’t. It’s a pain. But I didn’t feel as they do in a Broadway melodrama. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I just wanted to die.” – Floyd Dell
“A jealous husband is an ugly thing.” – Keith Ablow
“O jealousy! thou magnifier of trifles.” – Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
“Jealousy is the dragon in paradise; the hell of heaven; and the most bitter of the emotions because associated with the sweetest.” – R. Orage
“Throughout life, from childhood, from school until we die, we are taught to compare ourselves with another; yet when I compare myself with another I am destroying myself.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
“No one can have all he wants, but a man can refrain from wanting what he has not, and cheerfully make the best of a bird in the hand.” – Seneca
“You can’t be yourself within jealousy.” – Toba Beta
“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. ” – Carrie Fisher
“The venom clamors of a jealous woman poison more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.” – William Shakespeare
“Jealousy is an inner consciousness of one’s own inferiority. It is a mental cancer.” – B. C. Forbes
“Jealousy is beautiful only on a young and ardent face. After the first wrinkles, trust must return.” – Alfred Capus
Love Jealousy Quotes
“What sort of love is permeated by jealousy? You are jealous because you are unaware that everything you need is inside you.” – Peter Deunov
“Never love unless you can bear with all the faults of man: Men will sometimes jealous be, Though but little cause they see.” – Thomas Campion
“Love may be blind but jealousy has 20-20 vision.” – Anonymous
“It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.” – Lawrence Durrell
“Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.” – George Eliot
“There is more self-love than love in jealousy.” – François de La Rochefoucauld
“I love people who gossip behind my back. That’s exactly where they belong. Behind my back.”
“Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.” – Havelock Ellis
“In jealousy there is more of self-love than of love to another.” – François de La Rochefoucauld
“Jealousy is love in competition.” – Toba Beta
“Jealousy hyphenates love in all the wrong places.” – Terri Guillemets
“In jealousy there is more self-love than love.” – François de la Rochefoucauld
“He that is not jealous is not in love.” – Augustine
“Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read, it merely records the degree of the lover’s insecurity.” – Margaret Mead
“Jealousy and love are sisters.” – Russian Proverb
“Some people only hate you because of the way other people love you.”
“Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.” – Joseph Addison
“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
“The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.” – Colette
“Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.” – Josh Billings
“Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.” – Mark Twain
“Pure love allows no room for jealousy.” – James Lendall Basford
“Jealousy is simply and clearly the fear that you do not have value. Jealousy scans for evidence to prove the point – that others will be preferred and rewarded more than you. There is only one alternative – self-value. If you cannot love yourself, you will not believe that you are loved. You will always think it’s a mistake or luck.” – Jennifer James
“Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits.” – Paul Eldridge
“Jealousy is always born with love, but does not always die with it.” – François de la Rochefoucauld
Jealousy Quotes For Her
“Someone else’s success does not rob you of anything.”
“A little jealousy can be a good thing, for we may be reminded to appreciate what we have.” – Shane Parrish
“Never hate jealous people. They are jealous because they think you are better than them.” – Paulo Coelho
“Men are so constituted that every one undertakes what he sees another successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not.” – Johann Von Goethe
“People only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.”
“Oh, what a bitter thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.” – William Shakespeare
“A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.” – Seneca
“The jealous are possessed by a mad devil and a dull spirit at the same time.” – Johann Kaspar Lavater
“Keep your attention focused entirely on what is truly your own concern, and be clear that what belongs to others is their business and none of yours.” – Epictetus
“Jealousy’s a weak emotion.” – Jay-Z
“It’s such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you’re no better off, you’re unhappier, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are.” – Naval Ravikant
“You are jealous because you are unaware that everything you need is inside you.” – Peter Deunov
“The jealous bring down the curse they fear upon their own heads.” – Dorothy Dix
“As we are — the world is. That is, if we are greedy, envious, competitive, our society will be competitive, envious, greedy, which brings misery and war.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jealousy Quotes For Him
“The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.” – William Penn
“The worst part of success is trying to find someone who is happy for you.” – Bette Midler
“You don’t really see the person that you are envious of. You see a mirror that reflects what you find lacking in yourself. Paying attention to this can be very instructional. We often despise in others what we wish we could find in ourselves.”
“The bitter often band together into anti-support groups, conspiring to ensure no one succeeds. Forward momentum is stamped out quickly by the ambient sense of disapproval. Individual growth threatens the communal cover story. ‘If you can progress, what does that say about me?’” – Marcus Aurelius
“Jealousy injures us with the dagger of self-doubt.” – Terri Guillemets
“Jealousy is a crutch.” – Terri Guillemets
“Jealousy—Tormenting yourself, for fear you should be tormented by another.” – Paul Chatfield
“Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense.” – Honoré de Balzac
“Passion can quickly slip to jealous or even hatred.” – Arthur Golden
“Transform jealousy to admiration, and what you admire will become part of your life.” – Yoko Ono
“Jealousy is an awkward homage which inferiority renders to merit.” – de Puixieux
“More men die of jealousy than of cancer.” – Joseph P. Kennedy
“Everyone experiences bouts of jealousy; but the dignified person conceals it, while the vulgar one acts upon it.” – Ibn Taymiyyah
“You’re subject to sorrow, fear, jealousy, anger and inconsistency. That’s the real reason you should admit that you are not wise.” – Marcus Aurelius
Jealousy Quotes For Friends
“Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” – Gore Vidal
“It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.” – Aeschylus
“The fastest way to lose friends and alienate people is to get better and improve yourself.” – Life Math Money
“Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it, for jealousy dislikes the world to know it.” – Lord Byron
“You can be the moon and still be jealous of the stars.” – Gary Allan
“Jealousy sees things always with magnifying glasses which make little things large, of dwarfs giants, of suspicions truths.” – Miguel de Cervantes
“Trifles light as air, are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ.” – William Shakespeare
“Jealousy is the jaundice of the soul.” – John Dryden
“Nobody is ever jealous about the process, only the results.” – Regan Jacklin
“Jealousy is the only vice that gives no pleasure.” – Patrick Henry
“Jealousy is one of the wickedest of all the passions. But reprehensible though it is, jealousy is almost rather to be pitied than blamed – its first victims are those who harbor the feeling.” – Arthur Lynch
“Jealousy is one of the wickedest of all the passions. It is that which has been the most fruitful mother of tragedies, murders, and wars. But reprehensible though it is, jealousy is almost rather to be pitied than blamed–its first victims are those who harbour the feeling.” – Arthur Lynch
“Welcome to the wonderful world of jealousy, he thought. For the price of admission, you get a splitting headache, a nearly irresistible urge to commit murder, and an inferiority complex.” – Yippee. J.R. Ward
“Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.” – Honoré de Balzac
