Michael Gerber Quotes

We are bred to compare ourselves to the next person, to what they have and what they have accomplished.

There's always going to be someone with a bigger toy than yours.

It's one of the central problems of American culture: telling you if you're younger, more beautiful, more famous, whatever, that then you'll be happy.

Those who succeed can't forgive a fellow for being a failure, and those who fail can't forgive him for being a success.

Envy and jealousy stem from the fundamental inability to rejoice at someone else's happiness or success

Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man's, I mean.

I never resented anybody for being successful.

Fail, and your friends feel superior. Succeed, and they feel resentful.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn't mean what you have isn't beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have - no one is ever 100 per cent like, 'Yes, I'm the bomb dot com - from head to toe!'

Envy is the central fact of American life.

I realised that to compare your insides with other people's outsides leads to unhappiness.

You know, sometimes you're jealous of other people and their achievements, and you wanna be that person, but I've come to realize that each individual on this planet has his own path.

So much time is wasted on trying to be better than others.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

When I was a lad, my parents and all their equivalents never lusted after other people's riches or success.

I'm sure that it's a universal experience, but I wonder if it gets exacerbated more in Los Angeles, where people are constantly looking over at the other people, going, 'Why don't I have that? I want that. Their table looks warmer.'

I've seen a lot of people in my life base their self-worth on what job they book or don't book, what car they drive, or whether they can afford a house deposit or not.

Never get into the petty habit of measuring yourself worth against other people's net worth.

Success is somebody else's failure.

Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what.

Jealousy is in a manner just and reasonable, as it tends to preserve a good which belongs, or which we believe belongs to us, on the other hand envy is a fury which cannot endure the happiness of others.

You have money, fame, youth, beauty, talent. That's a good start... for feeling good.

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.

As our net worth falls, so does our self-worth. Ironically, it's when we don't have it that we most feel we have to flaunt it.

You always envy someone else's life and, as a woman, you're always comparing your life to someone else's life.