Archive

Quotes

All people have the common desire to be elevated in honor, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing it.

—Mencius, c. 330 BC

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

—Erasmus, 1515

We all have a contract with the public—in us they see themselves, or what they would like to be.

—Clark Gable, 1935

When I do a show, the whole show revolves around me, and if I don’t show up, they can just forget it.

—Ethel Merman, c. 1955

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

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. 

—Samuel Johnson, 1763

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

—Martin Luther, c. 1530

What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.

—Voltaire, 1723

Worldly 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. 1315

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

—Persius, c. 60

I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God.

—Madonna, c. 1985

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

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

And what will history say of me a thousand years hence?

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 59 BC