T. E. Lawrence Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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
Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom. Bulgars, Afghans, and Tahitans have it. Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense of your neighbour's occupying you is greater than the profit.

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
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars.
To earn to freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.

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

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 the dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.

T. E. Lawrence
Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors.

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

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
There could be no honor in a sure success but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.

T. E. Lawrence
Win and keep the confidence of your leader. Strengthen his prestige at your expense before others when you can.

T. E. Lawrence
This death's livery which walled its bearers from ordinary life was sign that they have sold their wills and bodies to the State: and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary.

T. E. Lawrence
The sword was odd. The Arab Movement was one: Feisal another (his name means a flashing sword): then there is the excluded notion, Garden of Eden touch: and the division meaning, like the sword in the bed of mixed sleeping, from the Morte d'Arthur. I don't know which was in your mind, but they all came to me — and the sword also means clean-ness, and death.

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
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
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
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
Then rose up the horror which would make civilized man shun justice like a plague if he had not the needy to serve him as hangmen for wages.

T. E. Lawrence
Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own while in the camp. I should find it better for my own part, since it was a comfortable dress in which to live Arab-fashion as we must do. Besides, the tribesmen would then understand how to take me.

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
Often I wish I had known at the beginning the weary lag that any sudden reputation brings. I should have refrained from doing even the little that I did; and now I would be left alone and able to live as I chose. To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one's tail.

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
The more unorthodox and Arab your proceedings, the more likely you are to have the Turks cold, for they lack initiative and expect you to. Don't play for safety.

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
Arabs of means rode none but she-camels, since they…were patient and would endure to march long after they were worn out, indeed until they tottered with exhaustion and fell in their tracks and died: whereas the coarser males grew angry, flung themselves down when tired, and from sheer rage would die there unnecessarily.

T. E. Lawrence
... but suppose we were an influence (as we might be), an idea, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head, we might be a vapor, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind, as we wanted nothing material to live on, so perhaps we offered nothing material to the killing. It seemed a regular soldier might be helpless without a target. He would own the ground he sat on, and what he could poke his rifle at.

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. 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. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.

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 could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly,

T. E. Lawrence