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

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. 

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.

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

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.