Skip to content

The greater the man, the less is he opinionative, he depends upon events and circumstances.

— Napoleon Political Aphorisms, Moral and Philosophical Thoughts (1848)

Another quote →

Topics

Mind

More quotes by Napoleon

I never was truly my own master but was always ruled by circumstances.

From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.

Sometimes a great example is necessary to all the public functionaries of the state.

Political Aphorisms, Moral and Philosophical Thoughts (1848)

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Necessity dominates inclination, will, and right.

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

All Napoleon quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Napoleon (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.