Top Quotes by T. E. Lawrence - QuoteMsg.com

T E Lawrence Quotes

T. E. Lawrence

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The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn, for, in everything but wits and knowledge, the Arab is generally the better man of the two.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Knowledge

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Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Nature

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All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Architecture

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It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Fear

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All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Men

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Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: War

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The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.
- T. E. Lawrence

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We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.
- T. E. Lawrence

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Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven.
- T. E. Lawrence

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I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
- T. E. Lawrence

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Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.
- T. E. Lawrence

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This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.
- T. E. Lawrence

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The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. He made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body. He saved his own soul, perhaps, and without danger, but in a hard selfishness.
- T. E. Lawrence

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To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one's tail.
- T. E. Lawrence

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When I am angry, I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie forever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.
- T. E. Lawrence

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A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been.
- T. E. Lawrence

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The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.
- T. E. Lawrence

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To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.
- T. E. Lawrence

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Isn't it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it's we who led our parents on to bear us, and it's our unborn children who make our flesh itch.
- T. E. Lawrence

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The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.
- T. E. Lawrence

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A first difficulty of the Arab movement was to say who the Arabs were. Being a manufactured people, their name had been changing in sense slowly year by year. Once it meant an Arabian. There was a country called Arabia; but this was nothing to the point.
- T. E. Lawrence

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Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers, terrible: a death in life.
- T. E. Lawrence

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Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression.
- T. E. Lawrence

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The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor.
- T. E. Lawrence

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Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Needs

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The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Ocean

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Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Dream

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It is difficult to keep quiet when everything is being done wrong, but the less you lose your temper the greater your advantage. Also then you will not go mad yourself.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Mad

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Do not try and do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: War

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Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Effort

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As long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Silly

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He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Wise

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You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That’s the feeling.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Sleep

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Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Contentment

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The dreamers of the day are dangerous... for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Dream

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Half a calamity is better than a whole one.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Half

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Yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake it in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: War

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To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: War

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The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Intuition

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Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Fate

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I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands/and wrote my will across the sky in stars
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Stars

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Mankind has had ten-thousand years of experience at fighting and if we must fight, we have no excuse for not fighting well.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Fighting

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There is an ideal standard somewhere and only that matters and I cannot find it. Hence the aimlessness.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Aimlessness

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A skittish motorbike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Animal

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I've been and am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen and I'm quite ordinary, and will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: People

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I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Moving

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The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Friendly

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It seems to me that the conquest of the air is the only major task for our generation.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Our Generation

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We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Beautiful

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I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.
- T. E. Lawrence
Collection: Loneliness