Napoleon Quotes

“But the romantic element in his nature was to be no so much extinguished as transmuted into a romantic ambition, into dreams of a career which should outdo all the heroes of history...The carefully calculated and limited ambition of a a Frederick the Great was no longer enough for Napoleon. The urge to dominate, to dare, to play for the highest stakes was as instinctive to him and as irresistible as the urge of the mountaineer to climb Everest. This element of the irrational, the unlimited, the daemonic is as fundamental to the nature of Napoleon as it is to the character of Mozart's Don Giovannia. Without it, the career of Napoleon is unintelligible.”
― Felix Markham, Napoleon

“The long feud between them has a certain piquant irony, because their affinity of temperament is as striking as their antipathy. In both of them the ideas of the Enlightenment were uneasily at war with the emotions of the Romantic Movement. Both had genius, and both were supreme egoists who thought that genius and the pursuit of glory put them above the ordinary rules.”
― Felix Markham, Napoleon

“Go, my son, fulfill your destiny. You were not made to die on this island.”
― Felix Markham, Napoleon