Napoleon

‘The hero of a tragedy, in order to interest us, should be neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent . . . All weakness and all contradictions are unhappily in the heart of man, and present a colouring eminently tragic.’

Napoleon, on François-Just-Marie Raynouard’s play The Templars

‘The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.’

‘If I were black,’ Napoleon said, ‘I would be for the blacks; being white, I am for the whites.’

‘To spend the night between a pretty woman and a fine sky, and spend the day recording observations and making calculations, seems to me to be happiness on earth.’