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

Men are generally more pleased with a widespread than with a great reputation.

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

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

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.

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

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. 

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

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

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it, and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

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

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

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