Napoleon Bonaparte Men Quotations [Page 2]

A man becomes the creature of his uniform.

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

The poor man commands respect; the beggar must always excite anger.

In tragedy great men are more truly great than in history. We see them only in the crises which unfold them.

As a rule it is circumstances that make men.

Give me a man with a good allowance of nose, . . . when I want any good head-work done I choose a man--provided his education has been suitable--with a long nose.

The most difficult art is not in the choice of men, but in giving to the men chosen the highest service of which they are capable.

To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.

Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men;.... Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses.

Wherever flowers cannot be reared, there man cannot live.

Man loves the marvelous. It has an irresistible charm for him. He is always ready to leave that with which he is familiar to pursue vain inventions. He lends himself to his own deception.

There are two merits that glorify a person: being courageous for a man and being virtuous for a woman. Besides these two, there is another merit that glorifies both man and woman: so much loving the homeland to an extent with being ready to sacrifice his/her life, if needed. Turks are such courageous and virtuous people. That is why you can kill a Turk but you can never defeat them.

In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments.

Time is the great art of man.

A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him

A man like me troubles himself little about a million men.

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.

War is a serious game in which a man risks his reputation, his troops, and his country. A sensible man will search himself to know whether or not he is fitted for the trade.

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.

Great events ever depend but upon a single hair. The adroit man profits by everything, neglects nothing which can increase his chances; the less adroit, by sometimes disregarding a single chance, fails in everything.

He who cannot look over a battlefield with a dry eye, causes the death of many men uselessly.

Ordinary men died, men of iron were taken prisoner: I only brought back with me men of bronze.

How many things apparently impossible have nevertheless been performed by resolute men who had no alternative but death.

Put a rogue in the limelight and he will act like an honest man.

There are two levers for moving men - interest and fear.

Ordinarily men exercise their memory much more than their judgment.

The art of choosing men is not nearly so difficult as the art of enabling those chosen to attain their full worth.

I believe love to be hurtful to society, and to the individual happiness of men. I believe, in short, that love does more harm than good.

In war, men are nothing, one man is everything.

The worse the man, the better the soldier.

That man made me miss my destiny.

All religions have been made by men.

One is more certain to influence men, to produce more effect on them, by absurdities than by sensible ideas.

Man will believe anything, as long as it's not in the bible.

Muhammad was a prince; he rallied his compatriots around him. In a few years, the Muslims conquered half of the world. They plucked more souls from false gods, knocked down more idols, razed more pagan temples in fifteen years than the followers of Moses and Jesus did in fifteen centuries. Muhammad was a great man. He would indeed have been a god, if the revolution that he had performed had not been prepared by the circumstances.

Great men are never cruel without necessity.

A man is known by his conduct to his wife, to his family, and to those under him.

How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares 'God wills it thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

A true man hates no one.

All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything.

I know men, and I tell you, Jesus is more than a man. Comparison is impossible between Him and any other human being who ever lived, because He was the Son of God.

Great men are meteors designed to burn so that earth may be lighted.

After making a mistake or suffering a misfortune, the man of genius always gets back on his feet.

Force is the law of animals, men are ruled by conviction.

If I were an Englishman, I should esteem the man who advised a war with China to be the greatest living enemy of my country. You would be beaten in the end, and perhaps a revolution in India would follow.

The fool has one great advantage over a man of sense; he is always satisfied with himself.

To have a right estimate of a man's character, we must see him in misfortune.

We are either kings or pawns of men

I like honest men of all colors.

Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.