Envy is thin because it bites but never eats.

This saying is commonly labeled a “Spanish proverb” in English-language collections of maxims and aphorisms. It belongs to a long Iberian and broader European tradition of moral proverbs that personify vices—especially envy (envidia)—as self-destructive forces. The image of envy as a creature that “bites” evokes corrosive resentment and backbiting, while the claim that it “never eats” suggests that envy gains no true nourishment or satisfaction from its attacks. In proverb culture, such formulations function less as quotations from a single identifiable speaker than as portable moral instruction, repeated in domestic, religious, and civic settings to warn against social comparison and spite.

The proverb frames envy as an appetite that can never be fed. To “bite” is to wound others—through criticism, sabotage, or malicious gossip—yet “never eats” implies that these acts do not yield lasting benefit to the envious person. Envy expends energy on negation rather than creation: it reacts to another’s good fortune instead of cultivating one’s own. Calling envy “thin” suggests both spiritual impoverishment and a wasting condition; the vice consumes the self even as it tries to consume others. The line thus warns that envy is doubly futile: it harms its target and simultaneously leaves the envier empty, unsatisfied, and diminished.