Success Quote by Paula Cole

Paula Cole’s line lands like an aside you mutter after an awards show: success is supposed to be the cure, yet it behaves more like an itch. The word “plebeian” is doing sly double duty. It’s self-mocking (no pop musician naturally talks like a Roman senator), but it also nails the class anxiety that comes with visibility. “Plebeian” isn’t just “regular.” It’s anonymous, unbothered, unexamined. It’s the state where you can want things without being punished for wanting them.

The first clause captures ambition in its simplest, most culturally legible form: you’re outside the gates, so you chase entry. The second clause flips the fantasy. Once you’re “successful,” you inherit the surveillance, the performance of gratitude, the pressure to be a brand rather than a person. Cole’s subtext isn’t that success is bad; it’s that it’s sticky. It clings to you in expectations, in how people narrate your life back to you, in the way every choice becomes “a statement.”

Context matters: Cole emerged in the ’90s alt-pop ecosystem where authenticity was both a genuine value and a marketable aesthetic. This quote reads like an artist’s critique of that bargain. You want success to buy freedom, then you discover it can also buy a cage. The yearning to be “plebeian again” is really a yearning for agency: to be ordinary enough to belong to yourself.