Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Caleb Colton

To diminish envy, let us consider not what others possess, but what they enjoy; mere riches may be the gift of lucky accident or blind chance, but happiness must be the result of prudent preference and rational design; the highest happiness then can have no other foundation than the deepest wisdom; and the happiest fool is only as happy as he knows how to be.

Charles Caleb Colton

The praise of the envious is far less creditable than their censure; they praise only that which they can surpass, but that which surpasses them they censure.

Charles Caleb Colton

If sensuality be our only happiness we ought to envy the brutes, for instinct is a surer, shorter, safer guide to such happiness than reason.

Charles Caleb Colton

Emulation looks out for merits, that she may exalt herself by a victory; envy spies out blemishes that she may lower another by defeat.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Envy is the religion of the mediocre

Edward Gibbon

Since the primitive times, the wealth of the popes was exposed to envy, their powers to opposition, and their persons to violence.

Elizabeth Montagu

it is more to my personal happiness and advantage to indulge the love and admiration of excellence, than to cherish a secret envy of it.

Edmund Waller

Poets may boast (as safely-vain) Their work shall with the world remain: Both bound together, live, or die, The verses and the prophecy. But who can hope his lines shou'd long Last, in a daily changing tongue? While they are new, envy prevails, And as that dies, our language fails.

Bertrand Russell

A life which goes excessively against natural impulse is... likely to involve effects of strain that may be quite as bad as indulgence in forbidden impulses would have been. People who live a life which is unnatural beyond a point are likely to be filled with envy, malice and uncharitableness.

Charles Caleb Colton

The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason.

Charles Caleb Colton

Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.

Charles Caleb Colton

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.

Charles Caleb Colton

Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.

Charles Dickens

Eccentricities of genius.

Camille Paglia

The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

Camille Paglia

Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.

William Shakespeare

There is none but he Whose being I do fear; and under him My genius is rebuked, as it is said Mark Antony's was by Caesar.

Bob Packwood

Historically, the Republicans have been geniuses at throwing away advantages.

William Shakespeare

If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.

Ben Jonson

I am beholden to calumny, that she hath so endeavored to belie me.-It shall make me set a surer guard on myself, and keep a better watch upon my actions.

Diogenes

Calumny is only the noise of madmen.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

His calumny is not only the greatest benefit a rogue can confer on us, but the only service he will perform for nothing.

George R. R. Martin

The best calumnies are spiced with truth.

Horace

There are calumnies against which even innocence loses courage.

Pierre Beaumarchais

Calumniate, calumniate; there will always be something which sticks.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Nothing is so swift as calumny, nothing is more easily propagated, nothing more readily credited, nothing more widely circulated.

Nicolas Chamfort

Calumny is like the wasp which worries you, and which it is not best to try to get rid of unless you are sure of slaying it; for otherwise it returns to the charge more furious than ever.