209 Quotes by Carl von Clausewitz

Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena.... But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.

Close combat, man to man, is plainly to be regarded as the real basis of combat.

Rather than comparing [war] to art we could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still closer to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale.

With uncertainty in one scale, courage and self-confidence should be thrown into the other to correct the balance. The greater they are, the greater the margin that can be left for accidents.

Blood is the price of victory.

No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy.

By ‘intelligence’ we mean every sort of information about the enemy and his country – the basis, in short, of our own plans and operations.

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.

There are very few men-and they are the exceptions-who are able to think and feel beyond the present moment.