Quotations: Fame

Fame is a pearl many dive for and only a few bring up. Even when they do, it is not perfect, and they sigh for more, and lose better things in struggling for them.
Louisa May Alcott

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
W H Auden

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.
Francis Bacon

Fame is an ego-building but back-breaking state of being which -- rather like love -- is most comfortable in private, and most frightening when its loss is contemplated.
Phyllis Battelle

Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.
Vicki Baum

Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.
Erma Bombeck

Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth. . . suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.
Julie Burchill

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.
Robert Burns

Fame is only good for one thing -- they will cash your check in a small town.
Truman Capote

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.
Thomas Carlyle

Have little care that Life is brief,/ And less that Art is long./ Success is in the silences/ Though Fame is in the song.
Bliss Carman

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
M. Cartmill

Acquaintance lessens fame.
Claudius

Fame is like a shaved pig with a greased tail, and it is only after it has slipped through the hands of some thousands, that some fellow, by mere chance, holds on to it!
Davy Crockett

Fame creates its own standard. A guy who twitches his lips is just another guy with a lip twitch -- unless he's Humphrey Bogart.
Sammy Davis Jr

Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate.
Emily Dickinson

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

But fame is theirs - and future days On pillar'd brass shall tell their praise; Shall tell - when cold neglect is dead - These for their country fought and bled.
Philip Freneau

A root is a flower that disdains fame.
Khalil Gibran

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking of something else.
Horace Greeley

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.
Graham Henry Greene

But here in the struggle for fame and pelf / I want to be able to like myself. / I don't want to look at myself and know / That I'm bluster and buff and empty show.
Edgar Guest

Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.
Benjamin Haydon

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.
William Hazlitt

Fame is that which is known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds.
Anna Jameson

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
Erica Jong

Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.
Longfellow

Fame is an embalmer trembling with stage fright.
H L Mencken

Fame lulls the fever of the soul, and makes / Us feel that we have grasp'd an immortality.
Joaquin Miller

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from that state of being.
A A Milne

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
John Milton

Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.
Maria Mitchell

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

All the fame you should look for in life is to have lived it quietly.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Fame can never make us lie down contentedly on a deathbed.
Alexander Pope

Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.
Rainer M Rilke

He lives in fame that died in virtue's cause.
William Shakespeare

Fame is like a river, that beareth things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.
George B Shaw

Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the net, it looks like very soon everyone on earth will have 15 Megabytes of fame.
MG Siriam

Fame is the penalty of success. Jealousy is the penalty of fame.
Sivananda

Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.
Baruch Benedict de Spinoza

What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little
Stanislaus

At first it was exhilarating but when I realized it wasn't going away, it became scary and claustrophobic. Fame is a weird thing.
Sharon Stone

Fame lost its appeal for me when I went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door.
Marlo Thomas

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
Mark Twain

Better the rule of One, whom all obey,/ Than to let clamorous demagogues betray/ Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
Oscar Wilde

Dead men hear no tales; posthumous fame is an Irish bull.
Israel Zangwill

Return to Greeting Cards Resource Home.