Sun Tzu’s war passages are an accounting, and one line of the accounting has been mistranslated. At 2.13–14 the Chinese says the people lose seven parts in ten and the state six; Giles’s 1910 translation prints “three-tenths” and “four-tenths”, which are the remainders of those figures. Calthrop’s 1908 version has seven and six. The Sun Tzu quotes on war worth keeping are the ones with a chapter attached, starting with 2.6: “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”
Sun Tzu quotes on war at a glance
8 passages, checked against the Chinese in Gutenberg #23864 and against both public-domain English translations: Lionel Giles’s 1910 version in Gutenberg #17405 and E. F. Calthrop’s 1908 Book of War in Gutenberg #44024.
| Quote | Chapter | What it means |
| “The art of war is of vital importance to the State.” | 1 | Giles’s sentence; the Chinese names arms, not war |
| “It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.” | 1 | The stake is the state’s existence, not a battle’s outcome |
| “a thousand ounces of silver per day. Such is the cost of raising an army of 100,000 men.” | 2 | The only daily figure in the book |
| “other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity” | 2 | Neighbours price your exhaustion and move |
| “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.” | 2 | The prohibition is on duration, not on force |
| “let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns” | 2 | Same rule, said a third time in the same chapter |
| “the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact” | 3 | War aims are limited by the value of what you want to keep |
| “As many as seven hundred thousand families will be impeded in their labor.” | 13 | The bill is paid by households, and the book says so twice |
What did Sun Tzu say about war?
The Art of War runs 13 chapters and only one of them, chapter 2, takes war as an activity rather than a technique. Its title is 作战, “operations”, and its subject is what a campaign costs. The remaining 12 chapters are about ground, momentum, fire, spies, terrain and the psychology of troops.
Two public-domain English versions of that chapter exist, one 116 years old and one 118, and the two disagree about the numbers. Quotations below are Giles’s 1910 translation unless marked otherwise; the Chinese follows the Gutenberg text, and I fetched all three files and compared them before writing a line. A book copied by hand for roughly 2,400 years collects a few faults, and chapter 2 has more than its share.
The opening sentence is a translator’s sentence
“The art of war is of vital importance to the State.”
— Art of War 1.1 · 兵者，国之大事 · trans. Giles, 1910
The Chinese has no phrase corresponding to “the art of war”. 兵 names the hardware and the men, weapons and troops; 战 names the activity of fighting. Neither is a word for war in the abstract, and the book’s title, 孙子兵法, is “Master Sun’s methods of arms” rather than “the art of war”.
Calthrop, working two years earlier, put a different noun in the same slot: “To all nations War is a great matter.” Both men supplied the abstraction; the original sentence is about armaments being the state’s great affair, which is a narrower and colder claim than either English version suggests.
兵法 (bingfa) — the methods of arms; a genre term for military writing, not a title, and the reason the book reads as a manual rather than a treatise on the nature of war.
作战 (zuozhan) — “operations” or the making of war; the title of chapter 2, and the only chapter heading in the thirteen that names war as an activity rather than a place, a device or a technique.
The distinction between a book about arms and a book about war matters more than it looks. A book about war in the abstract can be read for wisdom about conflict. A book about arms as an instrument of state survival can only be read for what it says about cost, and cost is what chapter 2 delivers.
Chapter 2 is an invoice
“In the operations of war, where there are in the field a thousand swift chariots, as many heavy chariots, and a hundred thousand mail-clad soldiers… the expenditure at home and at the front… will reach the total of a thousand ounces of silver per day. Such is the cost of raising an army of 100,000 men.”
— Art of War 2.1 · 凡用兵之法，驰车千驷，革车千乘，带甲十万，千里馈粮…日费千金，然后十万之师举矣 · trans. Giles, 1910
Giles’s paragraph is a receipt. Chariots, armour, provisions, glue and paint, the upkeep of wagons: he itemises what the Chinese lists, and then states the daily figure. Nothing in the chapter praises a campaign, and the only adjective in it that touches war at all isn’t praise; it’s “stupid”, attached to haste.
The same figure returns at the far end of the book. Chapter 13 opens by raising the same host of a hundred thousand, spends the same thousand ounces a day, and adds a number Giles renders as “As many as seven hundred thousand families will be impeded in their labor” (13.1). The book states its daily cost in 2 chapters, the second and the last, 11 chapters apart, and the two figures agree.
The two tenths that went the wrong way
2.13–14 is the passage to keep, because it is the only place in the thirteen chapters where the cost of a war is counted in the currency of the society paying for it, and the English version halves it.
“With this loss of substance and exhaustion of strength, the homes of the people will be stripped bare, and three-tenths of their incomes will be dissipated; while Government expenses for broken chariots, worn-out horses, breast-plates and helmets, bows and arrows, spears and shields, protective mantlets, draught-oxen and heavy waggons, will amount to four-tenths of its total revenue.”
— Art of War 2.13–14 · 百姓之费，十去其七；公家之费…十去其六 · trans. Giles, 1910“in all, seven-tenths of his income is forfeited… so that six-tenths of the Government’s income is spent.”
— Book of War 2 · 百姓之费，十去其七；公家之费…十去其六 · trans. Calthrop, 1908
七 is seven and 六 is six. 十去其七 reads “of ten, seven depart”, and the same construction gives six for the treasury. Calthrop’s freer version has it exactly right, and both men had the same sentence in front of them.
| Passage 2.13–14 | The people lose | The state loses |
| Chinese text | 十去其七 · seven in ten | 十去其六 · six in ten |
| Calthrop, 1908 | “seven-tenths of his income is forfeited” | “six-tenths of the Government’s income is spent” |
| Giles, 1910 | “three-tenths… dissipated” | “four-tenths of its total revenue” |
The two pairs are complements, 10−7=3 and 10−6=4, which points to what happened: the clause was read as naming what survived rather than what was lost. I can’t get inside a translator’s head from a text file, so treat that as the most economical explanation rather than a certainty. What is certain is that a reader who takes the English at face value comes away believing a long war costs the households of a state less than half of what the Chinese says it costs.
The Chinese is readable in the thirteen chapters at the Chinese Text Project, laid out in order, and the two characters can be checked there without reading anything else.
What the book forbids is duration, not force
“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”
— Art of War 2.6 · 夫兵久而国利者，未之有也 · trans. Giles, 1910
Chapter 2 says this three times in different registers. 2.5 concedes that haste is stupid and refuses to accept that delay is clever. 2.6 says the case has never occurred. 2.19 turns it into an instruction: “In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.” The prohibition is not on war; it is on time.
“when your weapons are dulled, your ardour damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity”
— Art of War 2.4 · 诸侯乘其弊而起 · trans. Giles, 1910
The mechanism behind the prohibition is 2.4, and it is not moral. A state that spends itself becomes an opportunity for its neighbours, and the sentence continues into the plainest statement of helplessness in the book: “Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.”
The aim is a country you can still use
“In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.”
— Art of War 3.1 · 全国为上，破国次之 · trans. Giles, 1910
Chapter 3 opens by ranking outcomes, and the ranking is about what is left standing rather than what was taken. A captured country that has been wrecked is worth less than one that has not, which is why the book’s logistics are built around using the enemy’s own stores: “Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy” (2.9), with a stated exchange rate of twenty to one at 2.15.
Counting destruction as a cost rather than an achievement is the book’s real theory of war. The accounting in chapter 2 exists to show how fast that cost multiplies.
Duration, not force: the constraint the war chapters set
Sun Tzu describes no campaign as glorious: the vocabulary of honour, of renown, of a nation’s spirit is absent from all 13 chapters, and the one place the book touches reputation in battle it removes both kinds. The good fighter’s victories “bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage” (4.12).
War in this book is a tool held by a state that would rather not use it, and the test of the tool is survival. In the Han catalogue the book sits with the military strategists, a school whose surviving texts are all manuals of this kind rather than defences of the calling.
“The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.”
— Art of War 1.1–1.2 · 兵者，国之大事，死生之地，存亡之道，不可不察也 · trans. Giles, 1910
Read 1.1 and 1.2 as one sentence, which is what they are, and the subject is not war but the state that may cease to exist. Everything after it follows: the arithmetic in chapter 2, the preference for taking things intact in chapter 3, the refusal to call a long campaign a success. The most quoted Sun Tzu quote about war is also the most misleading one, because it sounds like a statement about war’s importance when it is a statement about its price. The commander who has to carry that price gets a separate accounting in Sun Tzu Quotes on Leadership.
Three war lines Sun Tzu never wrote
Three lines carry most of the traffic. I checked each against the Chinese, against Giles and against Calthrop.
Did Sun Tzu say “if you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by”?
“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
— Not Sun Tzu. No source in the thirteen chapters, in Giles or in Calthrop.
The line is printed as a quotation from The Art of War on general quote sites, and it has no chapter because there is none to give. I found no river scene in the book that carries a body; the water passages are instructions about how to cross, in 9.3–9.6, and what to do when an enemy is crossing. Where the sentence came from is unresolved, and the fatalism in it is the opposite of 2.5, which refuses delay as firmly as it refuses haste.
Did Sun Tzu say “the more you read and learn, the less your adversary will know”?
“The more you read and learn, the less your adversary will know.”
— Not Sun Tzu. It appears on Wikiquote with no chapter and no translator.
Wikiquote’s Sun Tzu page is where a good deal of the circulating text originates, and it has carried this line for years. The sentence belongs to the genre of reading encouragement, not to a Warring States manual, and nothing resembling it appears in either English translation. It is also self-refuting as strategy: what an adversary knows is not a function of what you have read.
Did Sun Tzu say “all war is deception”?
“All war is deception.”
— Not the sentence in the book. 1.18 reads “All warfare is based on deception.”
Giles wrote “All warfare is based on deception” for 兵者，诡道也, and the reduction drops both the copula and the noun he chose. The Chinese is narrower still: 兵, arms and troops, are a 诡 way, 道 being a path or method rather than a predicate. That is a claim about how military force works, not a claim about what war is, which is why the sentence sits at the head of a list of specific tricks rather than standing alone.
Why do the online versions disagree word for word?
Because they are not all quoting the same book. Some quote Giles, some quote Calthrop, some quote a modern translation in copyright, and some quote Wikiquote quoting none of the three. The two public-domain versions differ at the first noun of the first sentence, which is a useful test: a page that opens by naming the art rather than the arms is following Giles, one that opens “To all nations War is a great matter” is following Calthrop, and a page that opens with neither is worth checking against the text before you copy it.
The eight lines that have been traced one by one are collected in Fake Sun Tzu Quotes, and the single occurrence of 诡 with what it does to the rest of the book is worked through in Sun Tzu Quotes on Strategy.
Questions People Ask About Sun Tzu on War
What is the most famous Sun Tzu quote about war?
The most reproduced line is 1.1, “The art of war is of vital importance to the State”, and it is Giles’s sentence rather than Sun Tzu’s. The Chinese says 兵者，国之大事: arms are the state’s great affair. Calthrop, translating in 1908, wrote “To all nations War is a great matter.” All three are short, and none of them says what the character says.
Are the Sun Tzu quotes on war online accurate?
Most are not, and the errors cluster in two places. The first sentence of the book is paraphrased by every aggregator, and the cost passage at 2.13–14 has been printed in English at less than half its stated figure since 1910. Of the 3 lines checked above, two have no source anywhere in the text and the third is a reduction of a real sentence.
How long does Sun Tzu say a war should last?
The book gives no limit, which is itself the answer. 2.6 says no country has ever benefited from a prolonged war and 2.19 makes victory rather than duration the objective, but neither states a number of days or months. The only time unit with a price attached is the day: a thousand ounces of silver, in chapter 2 and again in chapter 13.
What does 兵 mean in The Art of War?
兵 means arms, and by extension the troops who carry them; it does not name war as an activity, which is 战. The book’s title, 孙子兵法, is a term for military methods rather than a title, and its first sentence is about armaments being the state’s great affair, not about war being important in the abstract. Most lists of Sun Tzu quotes on war work from the second reading, which is why they read as philosophy of conflict rather than as procurement.
