He who gets it of nobody else, let him pay himself out of his own purse.

Fame is not prostituted at so cheap a rate:  rare and exemplary actions, to which it is due, would not endure the company of this prodigious crowd of petty daily performances.  Marble may exalt your titles, as much as you please, for having repaired a rod of wall or cleansed a public sewer; but not men of sense.  Renown does not follow all good deeds, if novelty and difficulty be not conjoined; nay, so much as mere esteem, according to the Stoics, is not due to every action that proceeds from virtue; nor will they allow him bare thanks who, out of temperance, abstains from an old blear-eyed crone.  Those who have known the admirable qualities of Scipio Africanus, deny him the glory that Panaetius attributes to him, of being abstinent from gifts, as a glory not so much his as that of his age.  We have pleasures suitable to our lot; let us not usurp those of grandeur:  our own are more natural, and by so much more solid and sure, as they are lower.  If not for that of conscience, yet at least for ambition’s sake, let us reject ambition; let us disdain that thirst of honour and renown, so low and mendicant, that it makes us beg it of all sorts of people: 

          “Quae est ista laus quae:  possit e macello peti?”

     ["What praise is that which is to be got in the market-place (meat
     market)?” Cicero, De Fin., ii. 15.]

by abject means, and at what cheap rate soever:  ’tis dishonour to be so honoured.  Let us learn to be no more greedy, than we are capable, of glory.  To be puffed up with every action that is innocent or of use, is only for those with whom such things are extraordinary and rare:  they will value it as it costs them.  The more a good effect makes a noise, the more do I abate of its goodness as I suspect that it was more performed for the noise, than upon account of the goodness:  exposed upon the stall, ’tis half sold.  Those actions have much more grace and lustre, that slip from the hand of him that does them, negligently and without noise, and that some honest man thereafter finds out and raises from the shade, to produce it to the light upon its own account,

          “Mihi quidem laudabiliora videntur omnia, quae sine
          venditatione, et sine populo teste fiunt,”

     ["All things truly seem more laudable to me that are performed
     without ostentation, and without the testimony of the people.” 
     —­Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., ii. 26.]

says the most ostentatious man that ever lived.