Fame Quotes
Pope leads, followed by Shakespeare, Homer, Edward Young and Virgil, which is about right for a topic that was a poet’s favourite for centuries. The sourced lines are short. Milton’s Lycidas (1637) says fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil; Byron’s Monody on the Death of Sheridan (1816) says folly loves the martyrdom of fame; and Swift, in 1711, calls censure the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
Flagged: a passage on living for something and leaving a monument of virtue, credited to Thomas Chalmers, is marked misattributed, and two Dryden passages, one about artists working for better fame and one about a poet’s chance of success, are disputed.
Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets' food is love and fame.
Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.
Sloth views the tow'rs of fame with envious eyes;
Desirous still, still impotent to rise.
Fame in arms or art, however conspicuous, is naught, unless bottomed in virtue.
Whate'er the passion, knowledge, fame, or pelf,
Not one will change his neighbor with himself.
He that hath once got the fame of an early riser, may sleep till noon.
There are names written in her immortal scroll, at which FAME blushes!