Names Quotes

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

He with holds his name. At the hotel, he is hardly willing to whisper it to the clerk at the book-office. If he gives you his private address on a card it is like an avowal of friendship; and his bearing, on being introduced, is cold, even though he is seeking your acquaintance, and is […]

I stayed in London till I had become acquainted with all the styles of face in the street, and till I had found the suburbs and then straggling houses on each end of the city. Then I took a cab, left my farewell cards, and came home. I saw Alison, Thackeray, Cobden, Tennyson, Bailey, Marston, […]

A signature always reveals a man’s character – and sometimes even his name.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and […]

In Marengo County during the first half of the twentieth century, the name ‘Abernathy’ meant integrity, responsibility, generosity, and religious commitment and it came to mean that largely through the life and testimony of the “black” Abernathys… So I feel no shame in going by a last name to which my father and mother brought […]

Lyricist Ira Gershwin’s shy and self-effacing nature is perfectly illustrated by a story conductor-composer John Green, an old Gershwin friend, tells: We were six couples having cocktails with Ira and his wife, Leonore. Ira phones a posh Hollywood restaurant for dinner reservations. Then he returned to the group. “No luck,” Ira said resignedly. “They’re all […]

I want the voice of honest praise To follow me behind. And to be thought, in the future days, The friend of humankind; That after-ages, as we rise, Exulting may proclaim, In choral union to the skies, Their blessing on my name.

Fool’s names, like fool’s faces – Are often seen in public places.

Ben Jonson is not to be confused with Samuel Johnson. He was Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson was not. Samuel Johnson was Samuel Pepys. Pepys was actually Raleigh, who had escaped from the tower to write Paradise Lost under the name of John Milton, a poet who because of blindness accidently escaped to the tower and […]