Fame is a fancied life in others' breath. [ Pope ]

I pity bashful men, who feel the pain,
Of fancied scorn and undeserved disdain,
And bear the marks upon a blushing face,
Of needless shame, and self-imposed disgrace. [ Cowper ]

What is fame? A fancied life in anothers' breath. [ Pope ]

A lady of genius will give a genteel air to her whole dress by a well-fancied suit of knots, as a judicious writer gives a spirit to a whole sentence by a single expression. [ Gay ]

The poets fabulously fancied that the giants scaled heaven by heaping mountain upon mountain. What was their fancy is the gospel truth. If you would get to heaven you must climb thither by putting Mount Sion upon Mount Sinai. [ Bishop Hopkins ]

Imaginary evils soon become real ones, by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall, or the wainscot, can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied. [ Swift ]

If flowers have souls, said Undine, the bees, whose nurses they are, must seem to them darling children at the breast. I once fancied a paradise for the spirits of departed flowers. They go, answered I, not into paradise, but into a middle state; the souls of lilies enter into maidens' foreheads, those of hyacinths and forget-me-nots dwell in their eyes, and those of roses in their lips. [ Richter ]

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]