Strategy is the most important department of the art of war, and strategical skill is the highest and rarest function of military genius.

Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people.

Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

Ambition is not a weakness unless it be disproportioned to the capacity. To have more ambition than ability is to be at once weak and unhappy.

Nothing is more binding than the friendship of companions-in-arms.

The force of selfishness is as inevitable and as calculable as the force of gravitation.

Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon.