Quote of the Day (Napoleon Bonaparte, on the Caprices of Fortune)

“Profit by the favors of Fortune while her caprices favor you; fear only that she will change out of spite; she is a woman.”—French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) quoted in Napoleon in His Own Words, edited by Jules Bertaut, translated by Herbert Edward Law and Charles Lincoln Rhodes (1916)

(The image accompanying this post, Adolph Northen’s painting Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow, depicts the moment when Fortune turned away from the soldier who once held most of continental Europe under his thumb. It gives hope—a quality needed now more than ever—that, with enough time, even the mighty, with all their unscrupulousness and cruelty, can be brought to heel by fate.)

 

Quote of the Day (Anne Bradstreet, on Winter and Adversity)

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” —American Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), “Meditations Divine and Moral” (1655)

The accompanying picture was taken in my hometown, Englewood, NJ, almost exactly a year ago, when snow was still on the ground on the first day of spring.

Quote of the Day (Willa Cather, on ‘Unexpected Favors of Fortune’)

“Unexpected favors of fortune, no matter how dazzling, do not mean very much to us. They may excite or divert us for a time, but when we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.”— Willa Cather, Song of the Lark (1915)