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

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.

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

Now there is fame! Of all—hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public—fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation by God of the artist. It is sad. It is true.

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

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