“It is not impossible that some of the most learned and polished nations of the world may be found to have sprung from Africa.”

Challenging racist assumptions about African civilisation and intellectual achievement · Letter to Samson Occom, 1774

• Fame
• Hope
• Truth

“Popularity is the falsest of all tests to apply to the work of any artist or thinker.”

Rejecting public approval as a reliable measure of artistic worth · Essay, The Muses in England, 1892

• Art
• Criticism
• Fame

“And, somehow, the eyes of that crowd began to pivot about him.”

Capturing the instant when collective attention finds its centre · Short story, The Captain and the Miracle (1918)

• Fame
• Truth

“To be ambitious of becoming a great man is the first step towards becoming a little man.”

A caution against confusing genuine achievement with the pursuit of status · Prose remark, commonly attributed

• Fame
• Truth

“A writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence.”

On the deeper ambition beneath a writing life · Autobiography, It's Too Late Now

• Art
• Fame

“Glory is a light which shines from us on others, not from others on us.”

Reversing the common notion that glory is reflected praise from outside · Imaginary Conversations

• Character
• Fame
• Glory

“If it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.”

Expressing faith that genuinely accomplished writing can outlive its author · Conversation, recalled by Malcolm Cowley, Life, 1949

• Eternity
• Fame
• Writing

“let the poet first consult his own heart, as I have done, and leave the rest to posterity,—to, I hope, an improving posterity.”

Preferring inward conviction to the fluctuating judgement of contemporaries · Letter to Sir George Beaumont

• Fame
• Poetry
• Time

“Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things, and I'll show you a man who cannot be trusted to do big things.”

Suggesting that reliability is revealed through attention to small responsibilities · Prose writings / commonly attributed

• Fame
• Truth

“I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”

Capturing the sudden, dizzying arrival of literary celebrity · Reported remark on the success of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

• Fame
• Time

“Each of us also has some private niche, some inconsiderable intimate shrine, for the poet no one praises, who is all the more our own.”

Celebrating the private affection readers form for poets overlooked by wider fame · Preface to her Collected Poems (1902)

• Fame
• Friendship
• Poetry

“Our ruined rhymes are not likely to last long, but if there is any hope at all of survival it comes from the fact that such writers as Lawson and myself had the advantage of writing in a new country.”

Suggesting that literary survival may depend as much on historical circumstance as artistic greatness · Retrospective prose essay, Looking Backward

• Fame
• Hope
• Poetry

“Not until he is dead, and perhaps some long time dead, is it possible for the public to take his exact measure.”

Suggesting that lasting literary judgement requires distance from contemporary reputation · Ponkapog Papers, Leaves from a Note Book (1903)

• Criticism
• Fame
• Time

“We may at times, knowing of honourable and inspiriting things in a poet’s life, read into his imperfect word a value that it does not possess.”

Warning that admiration for a poet can distort judgement of the work · Essay, The Lyric, The Best Words in the Best Order

• Fame
• Poetry
• Truth

“In the world of man's creation his people are citizens to match the noblest; they are of the aristocracy of the imagination, the peers in their own right of the society of romance.”

Granting fictional characters an enduring life within the imagination · Essay, George Meredith

• Art
• Fame

“A clerk in the Secretary's Office told me ‘it was all about my book’.”

Revealing his belief that his literary career had affected his treatment at the British Museum · British Museum statement, quoted by W. D. Paden

• Fame
• Poetry

“We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last.”

Wryly warns against turning admiration for any individual into uncritical devotion · Lecture, Uses of Great Men, Representative Men (1850)

• Fame
• Truth

“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame.”

Places inspiration and greatness within character rather than celebrated places · Essay, Heroism (1841)

• Art
• Fame
• Truth

“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.”

Mocking the romantic mythology that grew around her literary generation · Interview, The Paris Review, 1956

• Art
• Fame

“How transitory and fragile is the reputation of histories that were welcomed as perfect in their day.”

On the short life of most historical scholarship · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

• Fame
• Time

“That book is good in vain which the reader throws away.”

Judging literary quality partly by a book's power to hold its reader · Lives of the Poets, Dryden

• Art
• Fame

“It has always been an incredulous world in this matter.”

Observing the difficulty poets face in persuading contemporaries that their work will endure · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Criticism
• Fame
• Poetry

“A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.”

Advocating practical awareness without allowing wealth to govern the affections · Prose aphorism, Thoughts on Various Subjects (1711)

• Fame
• Truth

“And preie God save the kyng, that is lord of this langage.”

A brief expression of loyalty and concern for the English language · Treatise on the Astrolabe, concluding remarks

• Fame
• Truth