"Confidence is that feeling by which the mind embarks in great and honorable courses with a sure hope and trust in itself"
About this Quote
Confidence, for Cicero, isn’t swagger; it’s civic equipment. He defines it as a mental state that lets a person “embark” on “great and honorable courses” with “sure hope and trust in itself,” and the phrasing matters. Embark is kinetic: confidence is not an inner glow but a launch mechanism, the psychological hinge between knowing the good and actually doing it. “Great and honorable” narrows the target. This isn’t ambition for its own sake; it’s aimed at virtue in public life, the Roman ideal that personal character should be legible in action.
The subtext is a warning about what happens when that hinge breaks. Late Republican Rome was a pressure cooker of faction, bribery, demagoguery, and strongmen. Cicero, a statesman as much as a philosopher, watched institutions buckle under fear and opportunism. In that environment, “trust in itself” reads like an argument against both paralysis and self-excusing cynicism: the mind must be capable of betting on its own capacity to choose rightly, even when the crowd is loud and outcomes uncertain.
There’s also an elite undertone. Cicero is writing within a tradition where moral confidence is cultivated through education, rhetoric, and habituated virtue. He’s selling confidence as earned steadiness, not personality. The line works because it binds psychology to ethics: confidence is justified not by inevitable success, but by the willingness to commit to honorable action with disciplined hope.
The subtext is a warning about what happens when that hinge breaks. Late Republican Rome was a pressure cooker of faction, bribery, demagoguery, and strongmen. Cicero, a statesman as much as a philosopher, watched institutions buckle under fear and opportunism. In that environment, “trust in itself” reads like an argument against both paralysis and self-excusing cynicism: the mind must be capable of betting on its own capacity to choose rightly, even when the crowd is loud and outcomes uncertain.
There’s also an elite undertone. Cicero is writing within a tradition where moral confidence is cultivated through education, rhetoric, and habituated virtue. He’s selling confidence as earned steadiness, not personality. The line works because it binds psychology to ethics: confidence is justified not by inevitable success, but by the willingness to commit to honorable action with disciplined hope.
Quote Details
| Topic | Confidence |
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