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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:

"Let us now praise famous men"—
Men of little showing—
For their work continueth,
And their work continueth,
Greater than their knowing.

Rudyard Kipling

Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame,
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it Fame.

Alexander Pope

The cosmologist Fred Hoyle once warned Gell-Mann about the perils of fame. If you ever accomplish anything important in life, he said, the world will conspire to keep you from doing anything else again. Everyone wants you to give a speech, write an article, serve on a committee.

George Johnson

The culture of celebrity, defined by the media’s circular capacity to create stars who shine not because of specific deeds but mainly because they are the objects of media attention, was a true child of the sixties.

Susan Jacoby The Age of American Unreason (2008)

Fame, fame, fatal fame
It can play hideous tricks on the brain
But still I'd rather be famous than righteous or holy
Any day, any day, any day

Johnny Marr

[B]eing famous or well known can be nice or it can be a burden, it all depends on how you look at it.

Stefán Karl Stefánsson

Above all Greek, above all Roman fame.

Alexander Pope

If that thy fame with ev'ry toy be pos'd,
'Tis a thin web, which poysonous fancies make;
But the great souldier's honour was compos'd
Of thicker stuf, which would endure a shake.
Wisdom picks friends; civility plays the rest;
A toy shunn'd cleanly passeth with the best.

George Herbert The Temple (1633)

What is the end of fame? 'tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour;
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their "midnight taper,"
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.

Lord Byron Don Juan (1818)

His fame was great in all the land.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I have come in my Father's name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him.

Jesus

Why were they all so eager for fame? Surely nothing was ever less worth thinking about. (p 427)

Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Abandoned (1974)

Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness.

Anna Brownell Jameson Memoirs and Essays (1846)

Scarce any Tale was sooner heard than told;
And all who told it, added something new,
And all who heard it, made Enlargements too,
In ev'ry Ear it spread, on ev'ry Tongue it grew.

Alexander Pope The Temple of Fame (1711)

Thou hast a charmed cup, O Fame!
A draught that mantles high,
And seems to lift this earthly frame
Above mortality.
Away! to me—a woman—bring
Sweet water from affection's spring.

Felicia Hemans

The best-concerted schemes men lay for fame,
Die fast away: only themselves die faster.
The far-fam'd sculptor, and the laurell'd bard,
Those bold insurancers of deathless fame,
Supply their little feeble aids in vain.

Robert Blair

Of the unreasoning humours of mankind it seems that (fame) is the one of which the philosophers themselves have disengaged themselves from last and with the most reluctance: it is the most intractable and obstinate; for [as St. Augustine says] it persists in tempting even minds nobly inclined."

Michel de Montaigne

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

Washington Irving

Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it.

Albert Jay Nock Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)

Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

George Bernard Shaw

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