Napoleon Quotes

Posterity alone rightly judges kings. Posterity alone has the right to accord or withhold honors.

In politics, an absurdity is not an impediment.

A prince should suspect everything.

There is no such thing as an absolute despotism; it is only relative. A man cannot wholly free himself from obligation to his fellows. A sultan who cut off heads from caprice, would quickly lose his own in the same way. Excesses tend to check themselves by reason of their own violence. What the ocean gains in one place it loses in another.

The truth is that one ought to serve his people worthily, and not strive solely to please them. The best way to gain a people is to do that which is best for them. Nothing is more dangerous than to flatter a people. If it does not get what it wants immediately, it is irritated and thinks that promises have not been kept; and if then it is resisted, it hates so much the more as it feels itself deceived.

I do not believe it is in our nature to love impartially. We deceive ourselves when we think we can love two beings, even our own children, equally. There is always a dominant affection.

In love the only safety is in flight.

It is not necessary to prohibit or encourage oddities of conduct which are not harmful.

Simpletons talk of the past, wise men of the present, and fools of the future.

How many seemingly impossible things have been accomplished by resolute men because they had to do, or die.

There is nothing so imperious as feebleness which feels itself supported by force.

Man achieves in life only by commanding the capabilities nature has given him, or by creating them within himself by education and by knowing how to profit by the difficulties encountered.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, would be to be a god.

What are we? What is the future? What is the past? What magic fluid envelops us and hides from us the things it is most important for us to know? We are born, we live, and we die in the midst of the marvelous.

Whatever misanthropists may say, ingrates and the perverse are exceptions in the human species.