Lead the ideas of your time and they will accompany and support you; fall behind them and they drag you along with them; oppose them and they will overwhelm you.

Do you know what is more hard to bear than the reverses of fortune? It is the baseness, the hideous ingratitude, of man.

I pay attention only to what people do or say. I never pay attention to what they think.

Ambition never is in a greater hurry that I; it merely keeps pace with circumstances and with my general way of thinking.

I have seen only yoU, I have admired only yoU, I desire only You

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.

Nothing is so contrary to military rules as to make the strength of your army known, either in the orders of the day, in proclamations, or in the newspapers.