Quotes about fame

Human in every detail but then not so…He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that.

The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both.

Young Isaac had dreamed of fame.

Young Isaac was an idiot.

There were always people eager for attention who were happy to confirm whatever explanation the reporters wanted, so long as he gave them their fifteen minutes of fame.

Being of use to the world doesn’t always mean having your name in the papers...My plea to you is, think beyond celebrity. Do you think Tesla cared if he had his picture taken? Think of whether you’re any good to anyone, truly.

As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth.

Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes.

To see them from above: the roving herds of beasts, the rivers carving stone, the rituals of man in all their varied panoply, to see the clouds roil over the patchwork latifundia of Asian plains, to see the mines of our home, is to remember the patterns of the world, and the majesty and complication and impermeable obscurity of distant lands. It is to remember how few people you know. How many do not know you. How many will soon forget you. How many praise you today to offer contempt tomorrow. Permanence of fame, power, dominion of the individual, are illusions. All that will be measured, all that will last, is your mastery of yourself.

That is what my father told me. It was his warning about power, though he sought it to his end. I've never understood how a man so wise could be so undone by himself. Perhaps I never will, and that is what has always frightened me. Not that I cannot control my own fate - that is impossible - but that I cannot control myself.

...because city honours are not village honours. Like certain wines, they do not travel; carry them back to the village and you find they are dust in your hands.

The charm of fame is so great, that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.

“Now, boy, now...” he said bewilderedly, “what is all this talk of glory? Have you caught the sickness, too? Curse me for a blind beggar, I should have seen. This fever has cankered even your simple heart, hasn’t it, Simon? I’m sorry. It takes a strong will or practiced eye to see through the glitter to the rotten core.”

Glory is good, but gold is better.