But sure the eye of time beholds no name,
So blest as thine in all the rolls of fame.
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.
Though the desire of fame be the last weakness
Wise men put off.
What rage for fame attends both great and small!
Better be damned than mentioned not at all.
I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.
Modest fame is not to be despised by the highest characters.
She (Fame) walks on the earth, and her head is concealed in the clouds.
O glory of commanding! O vain thirst
Of that same empty nothing we call fame!
Nor Fame I slight, nor her favors call;
She comes unlooked for, if she comes at all.
From kings to cobblers 'tis the same;
Bad servants wound their masters' fame.
The life, which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe.
Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register'd upon our brazen tombs.