Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Fame
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It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit.
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In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.
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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
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I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once moreonly the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,--those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.
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It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.
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Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.
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Even the best things are not equal to their fame.
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The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history until the fame of its grassy meadows and fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peacable lives on its banks.
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I have made a very rude translation of the Seven against Thebes, and Pindar too I have looked at, and wish he was better worth translating. I believe even the best things are not equal to their fame. Perhaps it would be better to translate fame itself,--or is not that what the poets themselves do? However, I have not done with Pindar yet.
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Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.
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Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat andpotatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.
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The stars are the apexes of what triangles!
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The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects,of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he.
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Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
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See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
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Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.
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Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true.
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The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame... and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history.
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