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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.

Random quote on Fame

Most quoted on fame:

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else,—very rarely to those who say to themselves, "Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!"

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

'Tis a petty kind of fame
At best, that comes of making violins;
And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go
To purgatory none the less.

George Eliot

Let the cymbals of popularity tinkle still. Let the butterflies of fame glitter with their wings. I shall envy neither their music nor their colors.

John Adams

Fame lulls the fever of the soul, and makes
Us feel that we have grasp'd an immortality.

Joaquin Miller

Fame, if not double fac'd, is double mouth'd,
And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds;
On both his wings, one black, the other white,
Bears greatest names in his wild aery flight.

John Milton Samson Agonistes (1671)

All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.

E. M. Forster Selected Letters (1983)

Young Isaac had dreamed of fame.
Young Isaac was an idiot.

Jim C. Hines Revisionary (2016)

Building nests in Fame's great temple,
As in spouts the swallows build.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Honor … means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.

Arthur Schopenhauer

If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shin'd,
The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind:
Or, ravish'd with the whistling of a name,
See Cromwell, damn'd to everlasting fame.

Alexander Pope

Fame then was cheap, and the first courier sped;
And they have kept it since, by being dead.

John Dryden

It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.

Søren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling (1843)

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Emily Dickinson

The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody.

Cesare Pavese The House on the Hill (1949)

I am not concerned that I have no place; I am concerned how I may fit myself for one. I am not concerned that I am not known; I seek to be worthy to be known.

Confucius

Who grasp'd at earthly fame,
Grasped wind: nay, worse, a serpent grasped that through
His hand slid smoothly, and was gone; but left
A sting behind which wrought him endless pain.

Robert Pollok The Course of Time (1827)

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

Socrates

Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise: it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it: feel it, and hate it in silence.

Anna Brownell Jameson Memoirs and Essays (1846)

To myself alone do I owe my fame.

Pierre Corneille

And what is Fame? the Meanest have their Day,
The Greatest can but blaze, and pass away.

Alexander Pope

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