If fame is only to come after death, I am in no hurry for it.
—Martial, c. 86Quotes
They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.
—Martin Luther, c. 1530I am sick and tired of publicity. I want no more of it. It puts me in a bad light. I just want to be forgotten.
—Al Capone, 1929Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, now that, and changes names as it changes in direction.
—Dante Alighieri, c. 1315Now there is fame! Of all—hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public—fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation by God of the artist. It is sad. It is true.
—Pablo Picasso, c. 1961Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1843There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction which inclines every man first to hope and then to believe that nature has given him something peculiar to himself.
—Samuel Johnson, 1763He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.
—E. R. Dodds, 1951I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God.
—Madonna, c. 1985Reality is always the foe of famous names.
—Petrarch, 1337Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrities when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves.
—Sarah Bernhardt, 1904What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
—Voltaire, 1723Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it, and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1790