I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself.
Charles De GaulleRead
Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown.
Interpretation
Greatness involves venturing into uncharted territory and embracing uncertainty.
This quote by Charles De Gaulle suggests that achieving greatness requires one to journey into the unfamiliar and face uncertainties. It emphasizes that the path to becoming great is not a clear, defined route but rather an adventure towards discovering new possibilities and challenges, where the outcome is not always guaranteed.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming fears and taking risks.
I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself.
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
Today we are crushed by the sheer weight of the mechanized forces hurled against us, but we can still look to the future in which even greater mechanized forces will bring us victory. Therein lies the destiny of the world.
The perfection preached in the gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.
One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day was; one cannot judge life until death.
Soyons fermes, purs et fidèles ; au bout de nos peines, il y a la plus grande gloire du monde, celle des hommes qui n'ont pas cédé. [Let us be firm, pure and faithful; at the end of our sorrow, there is the greatest glory of the world, that of the men who did not give in.]
If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying, ''Here comes number seventy-one!''
Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat.
There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.
I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.
I think the reason I was successful is that I was never cynical.
As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes.
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