T.E. Lawrence Quotes

#1. Half-way through the labour of an index to this book I recalled the practice of my ten years' study of history; and realized that I had never used the index of a book fit to read.

T.E. Lawrence

#2. An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot. The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one, and Salammbo is the classical text-book instance.

T.E. Lawrence

#3. Always my soul hungered for less than it had

T.E. Lawrence

#4. We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.

T.E. Lawrence

#5. They taught me that no man could be their leader except he ate the ranks' food, wore their clothes, lived level with them, and yet appeared better in himself.

T.E. Lawrence

#6. Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.

T.E. Lawrence

#7. There is an ideal standard somewhere and only that matters and I cannot find it. Hence the aimlessness.

T.E. Lawrence

#8. A thick headcloth forms a good protection against the sun, and if you wear a hat your best Arab friends will be ashamed of you in public.

T.E. Lawrence

#9. Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.

T.E. Lawrence

#10. If you wear Arab things, wear the best. Clothes are significant among the tribes, and you must wear the appropriate, and appear at ease in them. Dress like a Sherif, if they agree to it.

T.E. Lawrence

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.

T.E. Lawrence

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Half a calamity is better than a whole one.

T.E. Lawrence

#17. Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown! Lawrence: We can't all be lion tamers.

T.E. Lawrence

#18. To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.

T.E. Lawrence

#19. 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

#20. This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.

T.E. Lawrence

#21. Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.

T.E. Lawrence

#22. I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly,

T.E. Lawrence

#23. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars.

T.E. Lawrence

#24. To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one's tail.

T.E. Lawrence

#25. 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

#26. The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.

T.E. Lawrence

#27. The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

T.E. Lawrence

#28. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.

T.E. Lawrence

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. All men dream, but nor 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 their dream with open eyes to make it possible. This I did.

T.E. Lawrence

#33. He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.

T.E. Lawrence

#34. 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

#35. The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.

T.E. Lawrence

#36. He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed ...

T.E. Lawrence

#37. To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.

T.E. Lawrence

#38. 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

#39. The vicarious policemanship which was the strongest emotion of Englishmen towards another man's muddle, in their case was replaced by the instinct to pass by as discreetly far as possible on the other side.

T.E. Lawrence

#40. The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.

T.E. Lawrence

#41. 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

#42. The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.

T.E. Lawrence

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known.

T.E. Lawrence

#46. Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day.

T.E. Lawrence

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.

T.E. Lawrence

#51. If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.

T.E. Lawrence

#52. Since the adventure some of those who worked with me have buried themselves in the shallow grave of public duty.

T.E. Lawrence

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers, terrible: a death in life.

T.E. Lawrence

#57. 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