reputation Quotes

″Clay, your reputation was deserved. But mine… mine was not. And there I was with you. Adding to my reputation.”

“Today people look at me, at my job and my Ivy League credentials, and assume that I’m some sort of genius, that only a truly extraordinary person could have made it to where I am today . . . Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.”

“Later on in the war, after the events in Sicily, the present valour and conduct of Brasidas, known by experience to some, by hearsay to others, was what mainly created in the allies of Athens a feeling for the Lacedaemonians. He was the first who went out and showed himself so good a man at all points as to leave behind him the conviction that the rest were like him.”

“With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had. He neither inherited a barn nor a title, nor even a young wife. But in spite of these disadvantages, he had begun even in his father’s lifetime to lay the foundations of a prosperous future. It was slow and painful. But he threw himself into it like one possessed. And indeed he was possessed by the fear of his father’s contemptible life and shameful death. ”

“Do you suppose I am going to make myself ridiculous before my whole staff, to let people think that I am a man to be swayed by all sorts of outside influence?”

“Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.”

“She carried her head high enough—even when we believed that she was fallen. ”

“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”

“Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.”

Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.

“The more unscrupulous I was, the greater my reputation was likely to be, for men are so blind that they even take pride in their blindness.”

“I’ve heard so many stories I don’t know which one is the most popular. But I do know which is the least popular. The truth.”

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”

“She did not seem to notice. Of all the unusual features of Stargirl, this struck me as the most remarkable. Bad things did not stick to her. Correction: her bad things did not stick to her. Our bad things stuck very much to her . . . All of her feelings, all of her attentions flowed outward. She had no ego.”

“Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.”

“You hardly know me, Johnny, so I beg you to believe my reputation: I’m a constant soldier and a sometime poet and I will be King.”

″...even though Sal never had the chance to defend himself, he is guilty. Not in the legal sense, but in all the other ways that truly matter.”

“But it wasn’t haunted by ghosts, just three sad people trying to live their lives as before. A house not haunted by flickering lights or spectral falling chairs, but by dark spray-painted letters of ‘Scum Family’ and stone shattered windows.”

“My record as a nerd and goody-two-shoes never seemed like much to me before. For sure, it didn’t compare to Chase’s—athlete, bad boy, big man on campus. But it was my reputation, not his, that got us out of a jam back there.”

“A reputation is all it takes to spread fear. And fear is a mighty weapon.”

“One of them yell out, ‘Don’t let them punk you, Li’l Don and Li’l Zeke! It don’t matter that my pops been locked up for nine years or that King’s pops been dead almost as long. They still Big Don, the former crown, and Big Zeke, his right-had man. That make me Li’l Don and King Li’l Zeke. Guess we not old enough to go by our own names yet.”

“You are the one I need. You have been found worthy of being knighted tomorrow, but you are still young and have no reputation for your valiant deeds. And yet I know I can trust you.”

“The Devil has a great reputation for destroying what honest men would be glad to see out of the way!”

″...that was the first time in my life I ever felt I could be snatched out of my character, my calling, my reputation, as if they could fall away like a dry husk.”