Quotes from Carl von Clausewitz

All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.

No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.

Tactics is the art of using troops in battle; strategy is the art of using battles to win the war

Four elements make up the climate of war: danger, exertion, uncertainty and chance.

Der Krieg ist nichts als eine Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit Einmischung anderer Mittel. War is merely the continuation of policy with the admixture of other means.

Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.

The more a leader is in the habit of demanding from his men, the surer he will be that his demands will be answered.

War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale.

The bloody solution of the crisis, the effort for the destruction of the enemy's forces, is the first-born son of war.

War is the province of chance. In no sphere of human activity is such a margin to be left for this intruder. It increases the uncertainty of every circumstance, and deranges the course of events.

Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.

What we should admire is the acute fulfillment of the unspoken assumptions, the smooth harmony of the whole activity, which only become evident in the final success.

...talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.

...self-reliance is the best defence against the pressures of the moment.

The state of crisis is the real war; the equilibrium is nothing but its reflex.

Timidity is the root of prudence in the majority of men.

Knowledge in war is very simple, being concerned with so few subjects, and only with their final results at that. But this does not make its application easy.

Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.

War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale.

Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves more or less as a substitute for hatred between individuals.

But everything takes a different shape when we pass from abstractions to reality. In the former, everything must be subject to optimism, and we must imagine the one side as well as the other striving after perfection and even attaining it. Will this ever take place in reality?

casualty reports on either side are never accurate, seldom truthful, and in most cases deliberately falsified.

an intellectual instinct which extracts the essence from the phenomena of life, as a bee sucks honey from a flower. In addition to study and reflections, life itself serves as a source.

The talent of the strategist is to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives.