From the great,
Illustrious actions are a debt to Fame.
No middle path remains for them to tread,
Whom she hath once ennobled. [ Glover ]

History tells us of illustrious villains, but there never was an illustrious miser. [ St. Evremond ]

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like a potato, - the only good belonging to him is underground. [ Sir Thomas Overbury ]

Talents angel-bright, if wanting worth, are shining instruments in false ambition's hand, to finish faults illustrious, and give infamy renown. [ Young ]

Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible. Vice is infamous, though in a prince, and virtue honorable, though in a peasant. [ Addison ]

Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names. [ Ausonius ]

I should dread to disfigure the beautiful ideal of the memories of illustrious persons with incongruous features, and to sully the imaginative purity or classical works with gross and trivial recollections. [ Wordsworth ]

Time has a doomsday book, upon whose pages he is continually recording illustrious names. But as often as a new name is written there, an old one disappears. Only a few stand in illuminated characters never to be effaced. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses? [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

It is a folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph. [ Addison ]

We enter our studies, and enjoy a society which we alone can bring together. We raise no jealousy by conversing with one in preference to another; we give no offence to the most illustrious by questioning him as long as we will, and leaving him as abruptly. Diversity of opinion raises no tumult in our presence: each interlocutor stands before us, speaks or is silent, and we adjourn or decide the business at our leisure. [ Landor ]