"Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied."

"He who has not first laid his foundations may be able with great ability to lay them afterwards, but they will be laid with trouble to the architect and danger to the building."

"He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must thereafter fall with the greatest loss."

"Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved."

"Is necessary to take such measures that, when they believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by force."

"War is a profession by which a man cannot live honorably; an employment by which the soldier, if he would reap any profit, is obliged to be false, rapacious, and cruel."

"To know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

"Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music."

"I dwell in possibility..."

"Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's only for wallowing in."

"The significance of a man is not in what he attains, but rather what he longs to attain."

"If what I do prove well, it won't advance. They'll say it's stolen, or else it was by chance."