T.E. Lawrence Quotes & Sayings

Afterwards the greedy Howeitat saw more oryx in the distance and went after the beasts, who foolishly ran a little; then stood still and stared till the men were near, and, too late, ran away again. Their white shining bellies betrayed them; for, by the magnification of the mirage, they winked each move to us from afar. — T.E. Lawrence

shortly I should be able to live at peace in my cottage, with all the twenty four hours of the day to myself. Forty-six I am, and never yet had a whole week of leisure. What will 'for ever' feel like, and can I use it all? Please note its address from March onwards - Clouds Hill, Moreton, Dorset - and visit it, sometime, if you still stravage the roads of England in a great car. The cottage has two rooms; one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath, in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep-time I take my great sleeping bag, embroidered MEUM, and spread it on what seems the nicest bit of floor. There is a second bag, embroidered TUUM, for guests. The cottage looks simple, outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection. — T.E. Lawrence

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

If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me. — T.E. Lawrence

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

The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books. — T.E. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen. — T.E. Lawrence

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

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

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

The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander. — T.E. Lawrence

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

I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty. Such temporal dignities were now in my grasp, only that my sense of falsity of the Arab position had cured me of crude ambition: while it left me craving for good repute among men. This craving made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself. Only too good an actor could so impress his favorable opinion. Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud. — T.E. Lawrence

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

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

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

We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. 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 remake 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

The Howeitat spread out along the cliffs to return the peasants' fire. This manner of going displeased Auda, the old lion, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in, and shook a hand at them, booming in his wonderful voice: 'Dogs, do you not know Auda?' When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune. — T.E. Lawrence

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is. — T.E. Lawrence

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

Suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert — T.E. Lawrence

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 to artist Eric Kennington, May 1935 ) — T.E. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

They were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and color-blind, for whom body and spirit were forever and inevitably opposed.
The Semitic mind was strange and dark full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardor and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. The were unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail. — T.E. Lawrence

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

The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths. — T.E. Lawrence

Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day. — T.E. Lawrence

He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed ... — T.E. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

Half a calamity is better than a whole one. — T.E. Lawrence

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

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

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

Learn all you can.... Get to know their families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads. Do all this by listening and by indirect inquiry. ... Get to speak their dialect ... not yours. Until you can understand their allusions, avoid getting deep into conversation or you will drop bricks. ~ T.E. Lawrence, from "The Arab Bulletin," 20 August 1917 — T.E. Lawrence

Always my soul hungered for less than it had — T.E. Lawrence

Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge. — T.E. Lawrence

I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly, — T.E. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it. — T.E. Lawrence

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

Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known. — T.E. Lawrence

The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts. — T.E. Lawrence

Since the adventure some of those who worked with me have buried themselves in the shallow grave of public duty. — T.E. Lawrence

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

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

The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them. — T.E. Lawrence

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

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

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

We cut three telegraph wires, and fastened the free ends to the saddles of six riding-camels of the Howeitat. The astonished team struggled far into the eastern valleys with the growing weight of twanging, tangling wire and the bursting poles dragging after them. At last they could no longer move. So we cut them loose and rode laughing after the caravan. — T.E. Lawrence

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