T. E. Lawrence Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T. E. Lawrence
The trouble with Communism is that it accepts too much of today's furniture. I hate furniture.

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

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

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
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
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
Rebellion was the gravest step which political men could take, and the success or failure of the Arab revolt was a gamble too hazardous for prophecy.

T. E. Lawrence
I am proudest of my thirty fights in that I did not have any of our own blood shed. All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.

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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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