“Work, I was built for work. I have known the limitations of my legs, I have known the limitations of my eyes, I have never known the limitations of my working capacity.”

“The art consists in making others work rather than in wearing oneself out.”

“All my life I have sacrificed everything - comfort, self-interest, happiness — to my destiny. Destiny must be fulfilled — that is my chief doctrine.”

“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.”

[Manuscript, early 1790s] But ambition, that immoderate desire to satisfy vanity or intemperance, which, never sated, leads Alexander from Thebes to Persia, from the Granicus to Issus, from Issus to Arbela, from Arbela to India — Ambition causes him to conquer and ravage the world and yet fails to appease him. The same ardor still consumes him, and in his delirium he no longer knows what course he should give it. In his agitation he goes astray….Alexander believes himself a god, he thinks himself the son of Jupiter, and he wants to make others believe it….

Ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes, ambition…is, like all inordinate passions, a violent and unthinking fever that ceases only when life ceases — like a conflagration which, fanned by a pitiless wind, ends only after all has been consumed.”