Ambition is best tempered with self-knowledge!

I have always thought that foreign-policy idealism has to be tempered with realism.

I study myself more than any other subject; it is my metaphysic, and my physic.

If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?

If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.