Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

It is in times of difficulty that great nations like great men display the whole energy of their character and become an object of admiration to posterity.

France needs nothing so much to promote her regeneration as good mothers.

The most terrible of all my battles was the one before Moscow. The French showed themselves to be worthy of victory, but the Russians showed themselves worthy of being invincible.

Women are nothing but machines for producing children.

It strengthens the bonds between nations to have the same civil laws and the same monetary system.

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

Destiny urges me to a goal of which I am ignorant. Until that goal is attained I am invulnerable, unassailable. When Destiny has accomplished her purpose in me, a fly may suffice to destroy me.

You cannot drag a man's conscience before any tribunal, and no one is answerable for his religious opinions to any power on earth.

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.

All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

Few really believe. The most only believe that they believe or even make believe.

A leader has the right to be beaten, but never the right to be surprised.

A good sketch is better than a long speech.

A society without religion is like a vessel without compass.

Anarchy is the stepping stone to absolute power.

Of all the peoples of Europe, Spaniards disgust me the least.

The fate of war is to be exalted in the morning, and low enough at night! There is but one step from triumph to ruin.

Soldiers win battles and generals get the medals.

Unavailable wars are always just.

Water, air, and cleanness are the chief articles in my pharmacy.

Revolutions are like the most noxious dungheaps, which bring into life the noblest vegetables.

My decision to destroy the authority of the blacks in Saint Domingue (Haiti) is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money, as on the need to block for ever the march of the blacks in the world.

When I had the honor to be a second lieutenant, I ate dry bread, but I never let anyone know that I was poor.

Life is strewn with so many dangers, and can be the source of so many misfortunes, that death is not the greatest of them.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.

There is a joy in danger.

History paints the human heart.

You cannot treat with all the world at once.

The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no fatherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain.

Victory is not always winning the battle...but rising every time you fall.

Surely in a matter of this kind we should endeavor to do something, that we may say that we have not lived in vain, that we may leave some impress of ourselves on the sands of time.

Wisdom and policy dictate that we must do as destiny demands and keep peace with the irresistible march of events.

Success is the most convincing talker in the world.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

Independence, like honor, is a rocky island, without a beach.

I would rather have a general who was lucky than one who was good.

I am the successor, not of Louis XVI, but of Charlemagne.

Good intelligence is nine-tenths of any battle.

Strangers are just friends waiting to happen. To become a good man, one must have faithful friends, or outright enemies.

Morality has nothing to do with such a man as I am.

In war, character and opinion make more than half of the reality.

Liberty and equality are magical words.

The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided. It is sometimes better to abandon one's self to destiny.

A battle sometimes decides everything; and sometimes the most trifling thing decides the fate of a battle.

Everything is more or less organized matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Necessity dominates inclination, will, and right.