Archive

Quotes

Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrities when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves.

—Sarah Bernhardt, 1904

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Most authors seek fame, but I seek for justice—a holier impulse than ever entered into the ambitious struggles of the votaries of that fickle, flirting goddess.

—Davy Crockett, 1834

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

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

—Madonna, c. 1985

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

—Erasmus, 1515

There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction which inclines every man first to hope and then to believe that nature has given him something peculiar to himself. 

—Samuel Johnson, 1763

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

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

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

—Aldous Huxley, 1925

Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, now that, and changes names as it changes in direction.

—Dante Alighieri, c. 1315

They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.

—Martin Luther, c. 1530

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

—Sammy Davis Jr., 1965