They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.

Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrities when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves.

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

Happy 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!

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.

If fame is only to come after death, I am in no hurry for it.

There 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. 

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury—to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.