Existential envy which is directed against the other person’s very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: “I can forgive everything, but not that you are– that you are what you are–that I am not what you are–indeed that I am not you.” This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a “pressure, ” a “reproach, ” and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe’s reflection that “against another’s great merits, there is no remedy but love. Max Scheler
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had. - Jodi Picoult

  2. Years from now, when I'm successful and happy, ...and he's in prison... I hope I'm not too mature to gloat. - Bill Watterson

  3. It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered. - Aeschylus

  4. She was wearing her fuzzy pink hat and she was happy, which was so obnoxious. She'd become one of those people who waltzed through life without so much as a split end, and I was still one of those people who changed diapers for free... - Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

  5. Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know. (By Moonlight) - Peter S. Beagle

More Quotes By Max Scheler
  1. Man is encased, as though in a shell, in the particular ranking of the simplest values and value-qualities which represent the objective side of his *ordo amoris*, values which have not yet been shaped into things and goods. He carries this shell along with him...

  2. Certainly, what Kant calls the transcendental reference, experience and object of experience are in a sense present in both opposed views of the nature of the subjective *a-priori*. In both cases the object must 'order itself' according to the rules of the knowing mind or...

  3. What is gained by the transcendence of the object is the identifiability of the object in a plurality of acts and the identifiability of what is thought by several individuals. This identifiability is not restricted to ideal objects, which are generated according to a definite...

  4. It is very important to note that the transcendence of the object is by no means a primitive component necessarily ingredient in all knowledge. It is missing in all ecstatic knowledge. In ecstatic knowledge the known world is still not objectively given. Only when the...

  5. The third preliminary problem for every theory of reality is that of the experience of transcendence. We saw in the case of Berkeley that his erroneous principle *percipi est esse*, and his assertion that any being which we think, just for the reason that it...

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