Men are generally more pleased with a widespread than with a great reputation.

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

All people have the common desire to be elevated in honor, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing it.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

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

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.