Top 67 Quotes & Sayings by T. E. Lawrence

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British soldier T. E. Lawrence.

Last updated on November 25, 2024.

Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence was a British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat, and writer, who became renowned for his role in the Arab Revolt (1916–1918) and the Sinai and Palestine Campaign (1915–1918) against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title used for the 1962 film based on his wartime activities.

British - Soldier | August 16, 1888 - May 19, 1935

Source: Wikipedia

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

T. E. Lawrence

The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.

T. E. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T. E. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

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

T. E. Lawrence

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

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 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

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

T. E. Lawrence

Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.

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

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

The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.

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

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

The Beduin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his sour this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free.

T. E. Lawrence

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

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

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

T. E. Lawrence

The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.

T. E. Lawrence

Half a calamity is better than a whole one.

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

I wrote my will across the sky, in stars

T. E. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

T. E. Lawrence

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

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

Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.

T. E. Lawrence

The dreamers of the day are dangerous... for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

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

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

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 haven't got a heart: only the former site of one, with a monument there to say that it has been removed and the area it occupied turned into a public garden, in pursuance of the slum-clearance scheme.

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

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

T. E. Lawrence

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

T. E. Lawrence

I prefer lies to truth, especially when the lies are about me.

T. E. Lawrence

In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade.... The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance.

T. E. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

Top 67 Quotes & Sayings by T. E. Lawrence

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