Lapham’s Quarterly

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury—to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.

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

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.

And what will history say of me a thousand years hence?

A woman’s greatest glory is to be little talked about by men, whether for good or ill.

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. 

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!

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

We all have a contract with the public—in us they see themselves, or what they would like to be.

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