The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
Meaning of the quote
The quote suggests that the reputation of famous people does not depend on how much they achieved, but rather on how well others praise and honor them. In other words, it's not the big things you do that make you famous, but the way people talk about and remember you.
About Jean Genet
Jean Genet was a renowned French writer and political activist. He started out as a vagabond and petty criminal, but later became a renowned novelist, playwright, and essayist. His most famous works include ‘The Thief’s Journal’, ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’, and plays like ‘The Balcony’, ‘The Maids’, and ‘The Screens’.
More quotes from Jean Genet
Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
I’m homosexual… How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn’t see Negroes hanging from its branches.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist (1910-1986)