Archive

Quotes

Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it, and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1790

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.

—Hesiod, c. 700 BC

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.

—Voltaire, 1723

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.

—Pablo Picasso, c. 1961

If fame is only to come after death, I am in no hurry for it.

—Martial, c. 86

When I do a show, the whole show revolves around me, and if I don’t show up, they can just forget it.

—Ethel Merman, c. 1955

I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God.

—Madonna, c. 1985

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!

—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1843

He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.

—E. R. Dodds, 1951

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

—Erasmus, 1515

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

—Petrarch, 1337