Alexander Theroux Quotes

Envy is the central fact of American life.

The artist envies what the arties gains, The bard the rival bard's successful strains.

Success has a lot of things that go along with it and I haven't experienced any personal resentment. I can't control any of that and I try not to worry about it. I hope that's not the case, you know. Most of the writers that I know and artists that I know understand what was going on. I think there's just as many things going on in the awards process that have to do with the show having won a few times.

We love much better those who endeavor to imitate us, than those who strive to equal us. For imitation is a sign of esteem, but competition of envy.

There was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.

The defect of equality is that we desire it only with our superiors.

The only happy artist is a dead artist, because only then you can't change. After I die, I'll probably come back as a paintbrush.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.

All i would like to say is that I'm rich and you're not.

Also our fellow competitors, who are indeed the people just mentioned - we do not compete with men who lived a hundred centuries ago, or those yet not born, or the dead, or those who dwell near the Pillars of Hercules, or those whom, in our opinion or that of others, we take to be far below us or far above us. So too we compete with those who follow the same ends as ourselves; we compete with our rivals in sport or in love, and generally with those who are after the same things; and it is therefore these whom we are bound to envy beyond all others. Hence the saying.

We are savages insides. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed. There isn't a person reading this who hasn't at one point or another had that why not me? voice pop into the interior mix when something good has happened to someone else.

A lot of my friends do creative things and are doing really well at what they do - some writers, some artists. I'm in a driven circle. I've had a lot of opportunities that other people wouldn't necessarily have and seen some cool places.

Certain artists can get away with certain things. Certain things are acceptable for certain people. It's a difference.

It is always better to imitate a successful man than to envy him.

ENVY, n. Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.

When someone less capable is ahead of me, I am not pleased. It makes me insane.

Emulation has been termed a spur to virtue, and assumes to be a spur of gold. But it is a spur composed of baser materials, and if tried in the furnace will be found to want that fixedness which is the characteristic of gold. He that pursues virtue, only to surpass others, is not far from wishing others less forward than himself; and he that rejoices too much at his own perfections will be too little grieved at the defects of other men.

I guess when people feel intimidated or they see something having success they steal it. I don't judge 'em for it but I'm starting to notice that.

Few men have the natural strength to honor a friend's success without envy.

[Envy not for...] Whatever difference there may appear to be in men's fortunes, there is still a certain compensation of good and ill in all, that makes them equal.

Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss.

My parents are artists, so I grew up with my mom having bonfires, seven guitars, and talented musicians and artists around like Jack Hirschman.

Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living.