The splendid achievements of the intellect, like the soul, are everlasting.

The line contrasts perishable, bodily or material things with the enduring products of the mind. By likening intellectual achievement to the soul’s immortality, it asserts that what humans create through reason—history, literature, laws, discoveries, and other works of thought—can outlast individual lives and even political regimes. In a Roman moralizing register often associated with Sallust, the sentiment also implies a hierarchy of values: glory grounded in virtue and intellect is more lasting than wealth, pleasure, or brute power. The quote thus functions as a compact defense of learning and authorship as a route to a kind of permanence.