My success and everything good that I have done, I owe to my mother.

Men have their virtues and their vices, their heroisms and their perversities; men are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but possess and practice all that there is of good and bad here below. Such is the general rule. Temperament, education, the accidents of life, are modifying factors. Outside of this, everything is ordered arrangement, everything is chance. Such has been my rule of expectation and it has usually brought me success.

The Concordat is not the victory of any one party but the consolidation of all.

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

The secret of great battles consists in knowing how to deploy and concentrate at the right time.

An army which cannot be reenforced is already defeated.

Moses has revealed the existence of God to his nation. Jesus Christ to the Roman world, Muhammad to the old continent.