Art & Creativity Quote by Harold Coffin

Envy isn’t framed here as a sin or a sudden emotion; it’s framed as a skill you practice. Coffin’s little twist - calling it an “art” - is the barb. Art suggests intention, technique, even pride. Envy, in this formulation, isn’t just feeling bad when someone else wins; it’s the deliberate mental craft of bookkeeping someone else’s life until your own looks impoverished by comparison. The line lands because it nails how envy recruits your attention: not to what you lack in absolute terms, but to what you can imagine someone else has in surplus.

The phrase “counting” does a lot of quiet work. Counting is obsessive and moralizing: it turns a neighbor’s good fortune into an inventory, a tally you can audit. And “blessings” adds another layer of acid. Blessings are supposed to be gifts, unearned, maybe even sacred. Envy profanes that by converting grace into evidence: look at what they got, look at what I didn’t. It’s a reminder that envy often masquerades as fairness - as if life were a ledger that ought to balance.

Coffin wrote in an American culture that prized visible success and public respectability, where status could be read in houses, jobs, and social standing. The quote anticipates today’s algorithmic comparison machine, but it doesn’t need Instagram to work. Its intent is corrective: redirect the gaze. The subtext is harsher: the thief isn’t your neighbor; it’s your own attention, and you’re the one picking the lock.