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.

Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage than audacity

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes.

War is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others.

To achieve victory we must mass our forces at the hub of all power & movement. The enemy's 'Center of Gravity'

The general unreliability of all information presents a special problem in war: all action takes place, so to speak, in the twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are. Whatever is hidden from full view in this feeble light has to be guessed at by talent, or simply left to chance. So once again for the lack of objective knowledge, one has to trust to talent or to luck.

[The cause of inaction in war] ... is the imperfection of human perception and judgment which is more pronounced in war than anywhere else. We hardly know accurately our own situation at any particular moment while the enemy's, which is concealed from us, must be deduced from very little evidence.