T. E. Lawrence - Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)

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

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
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
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
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
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
We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day's heat, fell dusty.

T. E. Lawrence
Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin...

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
War upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.

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

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

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

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