Life & Wisdom Quote by William Cowper

Cowper lands the blade where 18th-century Britain was most tender: the pride it took in conquest, commerce, and public “virtue.” “Glory” is the era’s polished word for acclaim, empire, military success, the whole reputational economy of a rising power. Cowper refuses to argue about tactics or policy; he attacks the moral accounting underneath. If the foundation is “selfish principles,” then the monument doesn’t merely wobble - it reverses meaning. What the crowd applauds becomes, by definition, “shame and guilt.” That turn is the engine of the line: it denies glory the neutrality people use to launder their motives.

The phrasing is courtroom-clean. “Built on” makes fame feel like architecture: deliberate, engineered, funded. “Principles” is a sly choice because it’s usually reserved for ideals; pairing it with “selfish” implies that self-interest isn’t an accidental impurity but a creed people rationalize and defend. Cowper’s Protestant moral sensibility - sharpened by his own bouts of religious melancholy and a culture steeped in sermons - gives the sentence its chill. He’s not offering a clever paradox for salon talk; he’s delivering a diagnosis.

The subtext is a warning about public life: reputation can be an incentive system that rewards predation as “achievement.” Cowper anticipates a modern discomfort with brand-building and power: if the engine is ego, the outcome doesn’t just look ugly later. It was rotten at construction.