Archive

Quotes

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

—Aldous Huxley, 1925

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

—Epictetus, c. 100

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

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 59 BC

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

—Madonna, c. 1985

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

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

—Clark Gable, 1935

I 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, 1929

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

—E. R. Dodds, 1951

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

Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth. Suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.

—Julie Burchill, 1986

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

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

Most authors seek fame, but I seek for justice—a holier impulse than ever entered into the ambitious struggles of the votaries of that fickle, flirting goddess.

—Davy Crockett, 1834