The fame that goes with wealth and beauty is fleeting and fragile intellectual superiority is a possession glorious and eternal.

The saying contrasts two kinds of “fame” or distinction: the social prestige attached to external goods (wealth, physical beauty) versus the lasting value of the mind. Its logic is characteristically moralizing and Roman: what depends on fortune, fashion, or the body is unstable, while what is cultivated in the intellect (and by extension virtue and judgment) endures and can outlast one’s lifetime through memory and influence. Read this way, the quote functions as a critique of status culture and a defense of education and inner excellence as the only secure form of glory.