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Quotes about fame

81 quotes from 64 people

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I’ve been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I’m quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I’m one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
T. E. Lawrence1888–1935Letter in T.E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters (1989) edited By Malcolm Brown, as quoted in “The Hero Our Century Deserved” by Paul Gray in TIME magazine (15 May 1989)
There is never any real danger in allowing a pedestal for a hero. He never has time to sit on it. One sees him always over and over again kicking his pedestal out from under him, and using it to batter a world with.
Gerald Stanley Lee1862–1944Crowds (1913), Book V, Part III, Chapter XVI.
- Character
I don’t mind people putting us down, because if everybody really liked us, it would be a bore.
John Lennon1940–1980The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 120
Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963Equality (1943)
The surest pledge of a deathless name
Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1807–1882The Herons of Elmwood, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Men of action, above all those whose actions are guided by love, live forever. Other famous men, those of much talk and few deeds, soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness.
José Martí1853–1895Martí: Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
John Milton1608–1674On Shakespeare (1630)
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
John Milton1608–1674Lycidas (1637), Line 78In context
When you’re famous you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does.
Marilyn Monroe1926–1962Comment on fame, quoted in Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress (1993) by Carl E. Rollyson, and in Symbolic Leaders: Public Dramas and Public Men (2006) by Orrin Edgar Klapp
- Envy
That’s the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. But if I’m going to be a symbol of something, I’d rather it be sex than some of the things we’ve got symbols of… I hate to be a thing.
Marilyn Monroe1926–1962Comment on her sex symbol status, quoted in Ms. magazine (August 1972) p. 40
- Sex
Few men have been admired by their own domestics.
Michel de Montaigne1533–1592Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Book iii. Chap 2. Of Repentance
How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation!
Michel de Montaigne1533–1592Essays, Book II, Ch. 16, Of Glory
Fame is not creativity, it’s the industrial disease of creativity.
Mike Myersborn 1963From the introduction to his memoir Canada (2016)
I know what’s going to be on my tombstone, and there’s no getting around it: “Here lies Ozzy Osbourne, the ex–Black Sabbath singer who bit the head off a bat.”
Ozzy Osbourne1948–2025What I’ve Learned (2005)
- Comedy
For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.
Pericles494–429 BCPericles’ Funeral Oration (431 BC)
- Life & Death