Wealth & Money Quote by Cleobulus

A line like this doesn’t “cancel” fame and wealth so much as demote them, stripping glamour down to a practical warning: don’t build your life out of materials that rot. Cleobulus is writing from an era where reputation was literally a form of currency in the Greek city-states, where poets, athletes, and rulers competed for renown, and where the word kleos (glory) carried real social power. Calling fame and wealth “fleeting and empty” is a cultural provocation, not a Hallmark truism. He’s pushing against the public scoreboard that defines status in a small, watchful polis.

The subtext is political as much as moral. One of the “Seven Sages,” Cleobulus traffics in civic wisdom: advice designed to stabilize a community by stabilizing the citizen. If people chase spectacle and accumulation, they become easy to buy, flatter, or panic. Wisdom and virtue “endure” because they’re portable and internal; they can’t be seized in a coup, lost in a shipwreck, or erased by a rival’s propaganda. That endurance isn’t mystical immortality so much as resilience: character survives volatility.

The phrasing also performs its own argument. “Fleeting and empty” lands like a double tap: time steals it, and even before time does, it’s hollow. “Endure forever” is deliberate exaggeration, a rhetorical anchor meant to reorient desire. In a world of precarious fortunes and public judgment, the quote sells a quieter form of power: the only status you can’t be exiled from is the one you’ve practiced into yourself.