"Reputation runs in a vicious circle, and Merit limps behind it, mortified and abashed at its own insignificance. It has been said that the test of fame or popularity is to consider the number of times your name is repeated by others … So, if you see the same name staring you in the face in great letters at the corner of every street, you involuntarily think the owner of it must be a great man to occupy so large a space in the eye of the town. The appeal is made, in the first instance, to the senses, but it sinks below the surface into the mind. There are various ways of playing one's-self off before the public, and keeping one's name alive. The newspapers, the lamp-posts, the walls of empty houses, the shutters of windows, the blank covers of magazines and reviews, are open to every one."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
On Patronage and Puffing
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Table-Talk
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Table-Talk
Table-Talk is a collection of essays by the English cultural critic and social commentator William Hazlitt. It was originally published as two volumes, the first of which appeared in April 1821. The essays deal with topics such as art, literature and philosophy.
51 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Table-Talk →
Related Quotes
"Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy."
"First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not unfrequently) to our cost when we have been wheedled out of t…"
"Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts."
"Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues him…"
"One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns readers...He is too mu…"
"He changes his opinions as he does his friends, and much on the same account. He has no comfort in fixed principles; …"
"Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito. Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller's sh…"
"Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may con…"
"The thing is plain. All that men really understand is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and ex…"
"Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge."