The art of war in its highest point of view is policy.
Self-reliance is the best defence against the pressures of the moment.
Strength of character does not consist solely in having powerful feelings, but in maintaining one’s balance in spite of them.
Blind aggressiveness would destroy the attack itself, not the defense.
Surprise becomes effective when we suddenly face the enemy at one point with far more troops than he expected. This type of numerical superiority is quite distinct from numerical superiority in general: it is the most powerful medium in the art of war.
War is only caused through the political intercourse of governments and nations – war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with an admixture of other means.
The more physical the activity, the less the difficulties will be. The more the activity becomes intellectual and turns into motives which exercise a determining influence on the commander’s will, the more the difficulties will increase.
Just as some plants bear fruit only if they don’t shoot up too high, so in practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil- experience.
Talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.
We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale.
As each man’s strength gives out, as it no longer responds to his will, the inertia of the whole gradually comes to rest on the commander’s will alone. The ardor of his spirit must rekindle the flame of purpose in all others; his inward fire must revive their hope.
By ‘intelligence’ we mean every sort of information about the enemy and his country – the basis, in short, of our own plans and operations.
The difficulty of accurate recognition constitutes one of the most serious sources of friction in war, by making things appear entirely different from what one had expected.
A prince or general can best demonstrate his genius by managing a campaign exactly to suit his objectives and his resources, doing neither too much nor too little.
A general who allows himself to be decisively defeated in an extended mountain position deserves to be court-martialled.
In war, where imperfect intelligence, the threat of a catastrophe, and the number of accidents are incomparably greater than any other human endeavor, the amount of missed opportunities, so to speak, is therefore bound to be greater.
Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.
No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.
In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.
The deduction of effect from cause is often blocked by some insuperable extrinsic obstacle: the true causes may be quite unknown. Nowhere in life is this so common as in war, where the facts are seldom fully known and the underlying motives even less so.