david strasser: envy

Showing posts with label envy. Show all posts

Thursday, April 11, 2019

Post #2804

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy—a vice which yields no return ?
―Honoré de Balzac

Friday, February 02, 2018

To pooh-pooh what we are never likely to possess is wonderfully easy. The confirmed celibate is loudest in his denunciations of matrimony. In Aesop, it is the tailless fox that advocates the disuse of tails. It is the grapes we cannot reach that we call sour.
—Aeneas Sage

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Post #2298

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Post #1989

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

Monday, December 02, 2013

Post #1422

The truest mark of being born with great qualities is being born without envy.
—François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Monday, March 18, 2013

Post #1212

A brave man or a fortunate one is able to bear envy.
—Publilius Syrus

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Friday, December 14, 2012

Post #1137

If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.
—Francis Bacon

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Post #1122

Envy's a coal comes hissing hot from Hell.
—Philip James Bailey

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Friday, May 04, 2012

Post #941

Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
―Honoré de Balzac

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Post #369

Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.
—Jean Vanier

The Penalty of Leadership

In every field of human endeavor, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. ¶Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. ¶In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. ¶The reward is widespread recognition; the punishment, fierce denial and detraction. ¶When a man’s work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few. ¶If his work be mediocre, he will be left severely alone – if he achieve a masterpiece, it will set a million tongues a -wagging. ¶Jealousy does not protrude its forked tongue at the artist who produces a commonplace painting. ¶Whatsoever you write, or paint, or play, or sing, or build, no one will strive to surpass or to slander you unless your work be stamped with the seal of genius. ¶Long, long after a great work or a good work has been done, those who are disappointed or envious, continue to cry out that it cannot be done. Spiteful little voices in the domain of art were raised against our own Whistler as a mountebank, long after the big world had acclaimed him its greatest artistic genius. ¶Multitudes flocked to Bayreuth to worship at the musical shrine of Wagner, while the little group of those whom he had dethroned and displaced argued angrily that he was no musician at all. ¶The little world continued to protest that Fulton could never build a steamboat, while the big world flocked to the river banks to see his boat steam by. ¶The leader is assailed because he is a leader, and the effort to equal him is merely added proof of that leadership. Failing to equal or to excel, the follower seeks to depreciate and to destroy – but only confirms once more the superiority of that which he strives to supplant. ¶There is nothing new in this. It is as old as the world and as old as human passions – envy, fear, greed, ambition, and the desire to surpass. ¶And it all avails nothing. ¶If the leader truly leads, he remains – the leader. ¶Master-poet, master-painter, master-workman, each in his turn is assailed, and each holds his laurels through the ages. ¶That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. ¶That which deserves to live — lives.
written by Theodore F. MacManus

david strasser

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