The best analysis I've heard for what made Napoleon great: "What characterizes him above them all is not alone the penetration and universality of his comprehension, but likewise and especially the force, flexibility, and constancy of his attention. He can work eighteen hours at a stretch, on one or on several subjects. I never saw him tired. I never found his mind lacking in inspiration, even when weary in body, nor when violently exercised, nor when angry. I never saw him diverted from one matter by another, turning from that under discussion to one he had just finished or was about to take up. The news, good or bad, he received from Egypt, did not divert his mind from the civil code, nor the civil code from the combinations which the safety of Egypt required. Never did a man more wholly devote himself to the work in hand, nor better devote his time to what he had to do. Never did a mind more inflexibly set aside the occupation or thought which did not come at the right day or hour, never was one more ardent in seeking it, more alert in its pursuit, more capable of fixing it when the time came to take it up.” He himself said later on: "Various subjects and affairs are stowed away in my brain as in a chest of drawers. When I want to take up any special business I shut one drawer and open another. None of them ever get mixed, and never does this incommode me or fatigue me. If I feel sleepy I shut all the drawers and go to sleep.” Never has brain so disciplined and under such control been seen, one so ready at all times for any task, so capable of immediate and absolute concentration. Its flexibility is wonderful, in the instant application of every faculty and energy, and bringing them all to bear at once on any object that concerns him, on a mite as well as on an elephant, on any given individual as well as on an enemy’s army. When specially occupied, other things do not exist for him; it is a sort of chase from which nothing diverts him. "I am always at work," says he to Roederer. "I meditate a great deal. If I seem always equal to the occasion, ready to face what comes, it is because I have thought the matter over a long time before undertaking it. I have anticipated whatever might happen. It is no genius which suddenly reveals to me what I ought to do or say in any unlooked-for circumstance, but my own reflection, my own meditation. I work all the time, at dinner, in the theatre. I wake up at night in order to resume my work."