These popular quotes will inspire you. Popular, of or relating to most of the people in a country or area or liked, admired, or enjoyed by many people or by a particular person or group.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging popular quotes, popular sayings, and popular proverbs.
Best Popular Quotes
- “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.” ~ Horace Greeley
- “The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.” ~ Henri Nouwen
- “I firmly believe that respect is a lot more important, and a lot greater, than popularity.” ~ Julius Erving
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“Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “The temptation many creative people I know have is to strive for popularity. To make, do, and say things that other people like in the hopes of pleasing them. This motivation is nice. And sometimes the end result is good. But often what happens in trying so hard to please other people, especially many other people, the result is mediocre.” ~ Scott Berkun
- “I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.” ~ Epicurus
- “Popularity is not leadership.” ~ Richard Marcinko
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“Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one’s social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education… But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one’s development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others – qualities which are within easy reach of every soul – are the foundation of one’s spiritual life.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “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.” ~ Immanuel Kant
- “There are a lot of bands who claim to be punk and they only play the music, they have no clue what it’s all about. It’s a lifestyle. It’s not about popularity and all that crap.” ~ Billie Joe Armstrong
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“Of all the scamps society knows, the traditional good fellow is the most despicable.” ~ J. G. Holland
- “There is what is called the highway to posts and honor, and there is a cross and byway, which is much the shortest.” ~ Jean de la Bruyere
- “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.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “Please not thyself the flattering crowd to hear;
‘Tis fulsome stuff, to please thy itching ear.
Survey thy soul, not what thou does appear,
But what thou art.” ~ Aulus Persius Flaccus - “In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow-men, he is constantly acting a studied part. The bold and peculiar traits of native character are refined away or softened down by the levelling influence of what is termed good-breeding, and he practices so many petty deceptions and affects so many generous sentiments for the purposes of popularity that it is difficult to distinguish his real from his artificial character.” ~ Washington Irving , Popular quotes about life
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“I would jump down Etna for any public good – but I hate a mawkish popularity.” ~ John Keats
- “To some men popularity is always suspicious. Enjoying none themselves, they are prone to suspect the validity of those attainments which command it.” ~ George Henry Lewes
- “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.” ~ Francis Quarles
- “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.” ~ Horace
- “Oh, popular applause! what heart of man
Is proof against thy sweet seducing charms?
The wisest and the best feel urgent need
Of all their caution in thy gentlest gales;
But swell’d into a gust–who then, alas!
With all his canvas set, and inexpert,
And therefore, heedless, can withstand thy power?” ~ William Cowper -
“The actor’s popularity is evanescent; applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.” ~ Edwin Forrest
- “An actor’s popularity is fleeting. His success has the life expectancy of a small boy who is about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.” ~ Fred Allen , Popular quotes about success
- “Those men who are commended by everybody must be very extraordinary men; or, which is more probable, very inconsiderable men.” ~ Sir Fulke Greville
- “A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf… For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.” ~ Thomas B. Macaulay
- “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.” ~ William Shenstone , Popular quotes about love
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“True popularity is not the popularity which is followed after, but the popularity which follows after.” ~ William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
- “I’ve given parties that have made Indian rajahs green with envy. I’ve had prima donnas break $10,000 engagements to come to my smallest dinners. When you were still playing button back in Ohio, I entertained on a cruising trip that was so much fun that I had to sink my yacht to make my guests go home.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “Popularity is exhausting. The life of the party almost always winds up in a corner with an overcoat over him.” ~ Wilson Mizner
- “Straight from the heart, I represent hip hop
I be three albums deep, but I don’t wanna go pop
Too many candy rappers seem to be at the top
Too much candy is no good, so now I’m closing the shop.” ~ Phife Dawg - “Every fighter should really do that if they can, because if you build a fan base at home first, then once they receive you at home, it’ll be easier to be received elsewhere.” ~ Roy Jones Jr.
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“The impression that you are a demigod worried me. I wanted to be like an ordinary human being with virtues and vices.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “It is better to be loved by one person who knows your soul than millions who don’t even know your phone number.” ~ Richard Paul Evans
- “I won’t be a rock star. I will be a legend.” ~ Freddie Mercury
- “Therefore the best fortress is to be found in the love of the people, for although you may have fortresses they will not save you if you are hated by the people.” ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
- “You can tell how popular a church is by who comes on Sunday morning. You can tell how popular the pastor or evangelist is by who comes on Sunday night. But you can tell how popular Jesus is by who comes to the prayer meeting.” ~ Jim Cymbala
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“I appreciate this moment in time…ball players and actors be knowing my rhymes” ~ Common
- “If you’re holding out for universal popularity, I’m afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.” ~ J. K. Rowling
- “Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked.” ~ Yogi Berra
- “Avoid popularity if you would have peace.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.” ~ Dave Barry
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“True popularity comes from acts of kindness rather than acts of stupidity.” ~ Robert Foster Bennett
- “Popularity? It’s glory’s small change.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.” ~ Edmund Burke
- “To please the many is to displease the wise.” ~ Plutarch
- “When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.” ~ Walt Disney
- “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.” ~ Alphonse de Lamartine
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“Avoid popularity; it has many snares, and no real benefit.” ~ William Penn
- “To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “But I don’t think the popularity of flying has diminished a bit.” ~ Gerard Arpey
- “Good-humor and, generosity carry day with the popular heart all the world over.” ~ Alexander Smith
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“Everybody’s private motto: It’s better to be popular than right.” ~ Mark Twain
- “He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack, For he knew when he pleas’d he could whistle them back.” ~ Oliver Goldsmith
- “The person who pays an ounce of principle for a pound of popularity gets badly cheated.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “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.” ~ Ben Jonson
- “Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!” ~ Wendell Phillips
- “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.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“The popular breeze – Aura popularis” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
- “A President cannot always be popular.” ~ Harry S. Truman
- “In high school, it was all about popularity, being with the boyfriend and all the girls thinking he’s cute.” ~ Ashley Tisdale
- “Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.” ~ Orson Welles
- “Popularity comes and goes. You need to know who you are, what you stand for, and why you’re here.” ~ Madonna Ciccone
