Daily Inspiration Quote by Cicero

Praise is Cicero's polite name for something rougher: status hunger, the social fuel that keeps the Roman machine running. In a republic where "virtue" was supposed to be its own reward, he admits the dirty secret that virtue also wants an audience. The line flatters human nature while quietly disciplining it. If everyone craves recognition, then the question is not whether you seek applause, but what kind of applause you deserve.

The twist is his moral inversion: "the better a man is, the more he is inspired to glory". That counters the pious ideal of the sage indifferent to acclaim. Cicero isn't celebrating vanity so much as reframing ambition as a civic resource. Glory (gloria) in Roman political culture wasn't mere ego; it was reputation made legible in public, the currency that could translate private character into public authority. A good man, in this telling, doesn't retreat from the spotlight; he uses it to model standards and to compete in visible service.

Subtextually, Cicero is also talking about persuasion. As an orator and statesman, he lived in a world where legitimacy depended on how deeds were narrated. To be "better" is partly to be more attuned to honor and to the judgment of peers. That creates a pressure toward exemplary conduct but also a trap: if glory is the measure, then optics can impersonate ethics.

Context matters: late-republic Rome was unraveling into strongmen, patronage, and civil war. Cicero's hope is almost managerial - redirect the inevitable craving for praise away from conquest and toward republican virtue. The anxious undertone is that if good men stop caring about glory, worse men will seize it.