Marcel Proust shut out visitors from his cork-lined room, where he wrote, but he probably expected to be immortalized in the literary canon. Even the most introverted drives and motives are set in a social context and amplified by the potential for achieving fame.
If that thy fame with ev'ry toy be pos'd, 'Tis a thin web, which poysonous fancies make; But the great souldier's honour was compos'd Of thicker stuf, which would endure a shake. Wisdom picks friends; civility plays the rest; A toy shunn'd cleanly passeth with the best.
Fame, if not double fac'd, is double mouth'd, And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds; On both his wings, one black, the other white, Bears greatest names in his wild aery flight.
To be rich, to be famous? do these profit a year hence, when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under ground, along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? But only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessings or pervades you, and intercedes for you. Non omnis moriar, if, dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am lost and hopeless, living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.
Fame has eagle wings, and yet she mounts not so high as man's desires.
I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name. [Lat., Nolo virum facili redimit qui sanquine famam; Hunc volo laudari qui sine morte potest.]
Modest fame is not to be despised by the highest characters. [Lat., Modestiae fama neque summis mortalibus spernenda est.]
Unlike the sun, intellectual luminaries shine brightest after they set.
Of all the rewards of virtue, . . . the most splendid is fame, for it is fame alone that can offer us the memory of posterity.
Time has a doomsday book, upon whose pages he is continually recording illustrious names. But as often as a new name is written there, an old one disappears. Only a few stand in illuminated characters never to be effaced.
And yet, after all, what is posthumous fame? Altogether vanity.
There is no employment in the world so laborious as that of making to one's self a great name; life ends before one has scarcely made the first rough draught of his work.
To have fame follow us is well, but it is not a desirable avant-courier.
A woman's fame is the tomb of her happiness.
It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The cloud-dust of notoriety which follows and envelops the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment.
Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.
Many actions calculated to procure fame are not conducive to ultimate happiness.
The love of fame usually spurs on the mind. [Lat., Ingenio stimulos subdere fama solet.]
The thirst after fame is greater than that after virtue; for who embraces virtue if you take away its rewards?
Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, and now that, and changes name as it changes direction.
Fame comes with its own standard. A guy who twitches his lips is just another guy with a lip twitch - unless he's Humphrey Bogart.
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
You're not famous until my mother has heard of you.
The love of fame is the last weakness which even the wise resign.
Fame and riches are fleeting. Stupidity is eternal
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