Daily Inspiration Quote by Plutarch

Plutarch’s line has the bracing common sense of a workshop proverb, but it’s aimed squarely at the moral life. Nobody mixes water into clay, walks away, and expects a wall to rise on luck alone. The image is domestic and unglamorous on purpose: virtue isn’t a thunderbolt of inspiration, it’s labor, repetition, pressure, heat. You don’t get “bricks” without the unromantic middle steps - shaping, drying, firing - and you don’t get character without training, habit, and deliberate choice.

The intent is corrective. Plutarch is pushing back against a very old human temptation: treating excellence as an accident of birth, a gift from the gods, or a future version of yourself that will simply arrive. His metaphor makes fatalism look childish. Chance may decide the weather, but it doesn’t decide whether you show up to the kiln.

Subtextually, the quote also flatters the reader with agency while removing excuses. If you’re dissatisfied with your “building,” the problem isn’t fate; it’s process. That’s a sharper claim than it first appears, because it relocates responsibility from the cosmos to the self - the central ethical move of Greco-Roman moral philosophy.

Context matters: Plutarch, writing in a world obsessed with reputation, civic duty, and the cultivation of the gentleman, treats self-making as craft. The brick is a social object as much as a personal one; your actions become the material other people live with. In that sense, he’s not selling hustle culture. He’s warning that unattended raw material doesn’t stay neutral - it collapses, spoils, hardens wrong.