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.

Edward Gibbon

[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.

Edward McKendree Bounds

The world needs more true praying to save it from the reign and ruin of Satan.

Charles Baudelaire

That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing.

Blaise Pascal

And is it not obvious that, just as it is a crime to disturb the peace when truth reigns, it is also a crime to remain at peace when the truth is being destroyed?

Elizabeth I

I find that I sent wolves not shepherds to govern Ireland, for they have left me nothing but ashes and carcasses to reign over!

Bruce Sterling

Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?

Andrew Marvell

Among the blind the one-eyed blinkard reigns

Henry IV

Paris must not be a cemetery. I do not wish to reign over the dead.

Alexander Pope

Fickle Fortune reigns, and, undiscerning, scatters crowns and chains.

Alan Chadwick

Patience is not a virtue!

William Shakespeare

If our virtues did not go forth of us, it were all alike as if we had them not.

William Shakespeare

Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes.

David Brooks

There is a virtue in shamelessness.

Baroness Orczy

Virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when it is crushed.

Eliza Haywood

Those possest of the greatest Virtues are always least pleas'd with the repetition of them ...

Bertolt Brecht

Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sure sign something's wrong.

Benjamin Netanyahu

The Romans used to say that courage is not the only virtue, but it's the only one that makes the other virtues possible.

Bernard Meltzer

One of the great virtues of our democratic system is that only one of the candidates gets elected.