C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Popularity
Popularity is power.
Avoid popularity, if you would have peace.
Popular applause veers with the wind.
Yet has the popular voice much potency.
To please the many is to displease the wise.
Whatever is popular deserves attention.
The good opinion of the vulgar is injurious.
Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you!
The great secrets of being courted are, to shun others, and seem delighted with yourself.
As inclination changes, thus ebbs and flows the unstable tide of public judgment.
They who are pleased themselves must always please.
There are people who, like new songs, are in vogue only for a time.
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
Our merit gains us the esteem of the virtuous; our star, that of the public.
Avoid popularity, it has many snares, and no real benefit.
Racine will pass away like the taste for coffee.
Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!
A habitation giddy and unsure hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.
Of all the scamps society knows, the traditional good fellow is the most despicable.
The actor’s popularity is evanescent; applauded to-day, forgotten to-morrow.
Public opinion is a courtesan, whom we seek to please without respecting.
Those men who are commended by everybody must be very extraordinary men; or, which is more probable, very inconsiderable men.
Good-humor and generosity carry the day with the popular heart all the world over.
There is what is called the highway to posts and honors, and there is a cross and by way, which is much the shortest.
I put no account on him who esteems himself just as the popular breath may chance to raise him.
The rude reproaches of the rascal herd for the selfsame actions, if successful, would be as grossly lavish in their praise.
I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who, living, makes a name.
And to some men popularity is always suspicious. Enjoying none themselves, they are prone to suspect the validity of those attainments which command it.
Applause waits on success; the fickle multitude, like the light straw that floats along the stream, glide with the current still, and follow fortune.
It is not so difficult a task to plant new truths as to root out old errors; for there is this paradox in men—they run after that which is new, but are prejudiced in favor of that which is old.
The love of popularity seems little else than the love of being beloved; and is only blamable when a person aims at the affections of a people by means in appearance honest, but in their end pernicious and destructive.
The vulgar and common esteem is seldom happy in hitting right; and I am much mistaken if, amongst the writings of my time, the worst are not those which have most gained the popular applause.
A generous nation is grateful even for the preservation of its rights, and willingly extends the respect due to the office of a good prince into an affection for his person.
I wish popularity; but it is that popularity which follows, not that which is run after—it is that popularity which sooner or later never fails to do justice to the pursuit of noble ends by noble means.
Could the departed, whoever he may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably find himself at a higher or a lower point than he had formerly occupied on the scale of public appreciation.
I have discovered that a famed familiarity in great ones is a note of certain usurpation on the less; for great and popular men feign themselves to be servants to others to make those slaves to them.
The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few.
The common people are but ill judges of a man’s merits; they are slaves to fame, and their eyes are dazzled with the pomp of titles and large retinue. No wonder, then, that they bestow their honors on those who least deserve them.
Be as far from desiring the popular love as fearful to deserve the popular hate; ruin dwells in both: the one will hug thee to death; the other will crush thee to destruction: to escape the first, be not ambitious; to avoid the second, be not seditious.
Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.
Popularity is like the brightness of a falling star, the fleeting splendor of a rainbow, the bubble that is sure to burst by its very inflation.
The world sees only the reflection of merit; therefore when you come to know a really great man intimately, you may as often find him above as below his reputation.
The greatness of a popular character is less according to the ratio of his genius than the sympathy he shows with the prejudices and even the absurdities of his time. Fanatics do not select the cleverest, but the most fanatical leaders; as was evidenced in the choice of Robespierre by the French Jacobins, and in that of Cromwell by the English Puritans.