A system of morality that is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception that has nothing sound in it and nothing true.
SocratesRead
The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Envy can consume a person, leading to personal suffering while others prosper.
This quote from Socrates illustrates how envy adversely affects the person who harbors it. Instead of enjoying their own life and successes, an envious individual becomes tormented by the well-being of others, which ultimately harms their own happiness and fulfillment.
Themes
EnvySufferingHappinessProsperityPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
A motivational speaker could use this quote to demonstrate the importance of focusing on personal growth instead of comparing oneself to others.
More from Socrates
All quotes βThe poets are only the interpreters of the gods.
SocratesRead
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.
SocratesRead
The unexamined life is not worth living.
SocratesRead
When I was young, I believed that life might unfold in an orderly way, according to my hopes and expectations. But now I understand that the Way winds like a river, always changing, ever onward.. My journeys revealed that the Way itself creates the warrior; that every path leads to peace, every choice to wisdom. And that life has always been, and will always be, arising in Mystery.
SocratesRead
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued." "It is not living that matters, but living rightly. The unexamined life is not worth living.
SocratesRead
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Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!
Emile M. CioranRead
I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom.
Christopher HitchensRead
because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith.
Paulo CoelhoRead
To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
Milan KunderaRead
And then he drew a dial from his poke, And looking with lack-lustre eye, Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock: Thus we may see', Quoth he, 'how the world wags: 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more 'twill be eleven; And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.
William ShakespeareRead
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.
Umberto EcoRead