One might as well try to charge through a wall.
Do you wish to find out the really sublime? Repeat the Lord’s Prayer.
We frustrate many designs against us by pretending not to see them.
One must indeed be ignorant of the methods of genius to suppose that it allows itself to be cramped by forms. Forms are for mediocrity, and it is fortunate that mediocrity can act only according to routine. Ability takes its flight unhindered.
There is no place in a fanatic’s head where reason can enter.
After me, the Revolution – or, rather the ideas which formed it – will resume their course. It will be like a book from which the marker is removed, and one starts to read again at the page where one left off.
Men soon get tired of shedding their blood for the advantage of a few individuals, who think they amply reward the soldiers perils with the treasures they amass.
Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and it is that to which the legislator ought to give the greatest encouragement.
He, who practices right, but in the hope of acquiring great renown, is very near to vice.
The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty, privation, and want are the school of the good soldier.
A fool is only troublesome, a pedant insupportable.
Republican despotism is more fertile in acts of tyranny, because everyone has a hand in it.
Treaties are observed as long as they are in harmony with interests.
All becomes easy when we follow the current of opinion; it is the ruler of the world.
A commander in chief ought to say to himself several times a day: If the enemy should appear on my front, on my right, on my left, what would I do? And if the question finds him uncertain, he is not well placed, he is not as he should be, and he should remedy it.
An empty throne always tempts me.
The practice of law sharpens the mind by making it narrow.
God has decreed that there be sick and poor in this world, but in the next it will be the other way around.
To be believed make the truth unbelievable.
As a rule it is circumstances that make men.